Check out this article by Dr. Cassie Ferguson from CLOSLER that discusses the difference between compassion and empathy, as well as how we can cultivate compassion in particularly emotionally challenging clinical specialties such as Pediatric Emergency Medicine.
One late night, I sat in the middle of the pediatric intensive care unit with my supervising fellow and the hospital chaplain. A teenager we’d been caring for had just chosen to be decannulated and allowed to die. She was 16 and had a rare neuromuscular disease that had progressed to the point that she couldn’t breathe without a ventilator. More devastatingly, she could no longer paint or draw.
“Some days,” the chaplain said, “some days we are called to the messy.”
The ingrained Western cultural viewpoint of scarcity—we can never have enough, know enough, be enough—creates a feeling that compassion is finite. A different perspective is that our capacity for compassion is endless—that we can hold and attend to both the joy and the pain of our work. That we can find meaning in and be transformed by the suffering we witness. This begins with recognizing the limitations of empathy.
Read more here on CLOSLER.
One late night, I sat in the middle of the pediatric intensive care unit with my supervising fellow and the hospital chaplain. A teenager we’d been caring for had just chosen to be decannulated and allowed to die. She was 16 and had a rare neuromuscular disease that had progressed to the point that she couldn’t breathe without a ventilator. More devastatingly, she could no longer paint or draw.
“Some days,” the chaplain said, “some days we are called to the messy.”
The ingrained Western cultural viewpoint of scarcity—we can never have enough, know enough, be enough—creates a feeling that compassion is finite. A different perspective is that our capacity for compassion is endless—that we can hold and attend to both the joy and the pain of our work. That we can find meaning in and be transformed by the suffering we witness. This begins with recognizing the limitations of empathy.
Read more here on CLOSLER.