Doctors Under the Microscope: An Informative Look at Coping with Death in Health Care BY ARIELA FEINBLUM '23, DR. YVON BRYAN MD Cover Image Source: Unsplash
Image 1: A distraught doctor. Image Source: Unsplash
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Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has affected pre-med undergraduate students in many ways; though we often focus on the pandemic preventing students from shadowing doctors, it has also directed many undergraduates’ attention to the death that doctors encounter in their work. This has been an eye-opening experience for many, but doctors have had to deal with patients dying since long before the pandemic. This can be very upsetting for doctors, like that portrayed in Figure 1. As an undergraduate student and aspiring doctor, myself, I believe it is essential to understand how doctors deal with this difficult aspect of their jobs. Many undergraduate students do not think about how they will personally deal with the inevitable deaths of future patients. There are also many different types of patient deaths. It is important for undergraduates to think about such factors before they become practicing medical professionals. Deaths caused by things like suicide and murder can be very troubling and tragic. Other deaths, such as those of patients who die with the assistance of euthanasia, can be seen as ending the patients’ pain and suffering. A patient's death does not have to be violent for a doctor to have difficulty coping. Factors like
the patient's age can affect how hard it is for the doctor to process that patient’s passing (RhodesKropf et al., 2005). I used the field of anesthesiology as a lens into the greater field of medicine. To understand how difficult some cases are for doctors to
DARTMOUTH UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF SCIENCE
