Response to ‘Burnt out or fired up’ and ‘The Tao of family medicine’

In what is perhaps an example of Jung’s ‘wounded healer’, Alastair Dobbin in his excellent article ‘Burnt out or fired up’ shows the two-way nature of this relationship.¹ As Gautama Buddha recognised, being a doctor hopefully leads to a deeper understanding of the human condition and, ultimately, leads to the healing of the physician as well as the patient.

Nigel Mathers in his James Mackenzie Lecture 2013 emphasises the importance of the intuitive side of general practice, of experiencing a sense of ‘flow’, to ‘be’ rather than ‘do’.²

But I find that when I have to keep one eye on the patient (who may have four or five pressing problems), one eye on the computer (which has a long list exhorting us to focus on the minutiae irrelevant to the consultation), and possibly my intuitive ‘third eye’ on the clock, the sense of ‘flow’ is more akin to being swept along on a raging torrent, trying desperately to prevent oneself being dashed against the rocks.

And it’s very hard to ‘be’ when one is being given increasingly bizarre things to ‘do’ (unplanned Admissions DES, anyone?), which leaves us no time to ‘be’ anything at all, with our patients, staff, or even families.

To continue the Eastern theme of these two articles I quote Swami Vivekananda who said, ‘it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics’.

• © British Journal of General Practice 2014