How Do You Emotionally Support a Doctor?

First, we should internalize the immense responsibility doctors hold in our world. People entrust doctors with the most valuable thing they have, their very life. Since most people do not live spiritual lives, i.e., life in connection with the upper force of love, bestowal, and connection, then their physical bodies define their existence. When those bodies stop obeying them, they place their hope in doctors, believing that doctors have the power to restore their health. In this sense, doctors become almost supreme beings in their eyes.

Doctors, in turn, feel this great responsibility. They cannot simply brush it off. Their workload is enormous, with dozens and sometimes hundreds of patients, and new ones constantly arriving while the old ones remain. Day after day, this weight accumulates. Yet no one teaches doctors how to cope with the expectation that they must be godlike. There is no real psychological support for them, nor is there a well-defined medical code that clearly outlines how a doctor should interact with a patient who views them as a healer in the highest sense of the word.

In ancient times, people had a more natural understanding of life and death. They recognized that a doctor could only help to some extent. But today, the perception has changed. Modern society places doctors on an impossibly high pedestal, making it seem as though a person’s entire life is in their hands. This is an incredible burden. It is extremely difficult for anyone to withstand such expectations.

And yet, a doctor cannot simply walk away. Medicine is not just a profession, but a calling. To become a doctor takes ten to fifteen years of rigorous study. Beyond that, it carries an enormous responsibility of the doctor toward society, toward patients, and toward their own families. It also comes with respect, honor, and a public status. Doctors thus find themselves trapped in this role. Some efforts are being made to improve the situation, but the path to a long-lasting positive change is difficult.

After raising awareness of the weight doctors carry, they can be emotionally helped by placing people alongside them with a role of bearing the psychological burden that patients place on doctors. Imagine a doctor administering an injection while this spiritually or psychologically supportive person holds the patient’s hand, comforting them. This is how a person can receive both physical and emotional care, addressing the needs of both body and soul.

We cannot avoid this necessity because human desires are constantly evolving. They are becoming more delicate, more intricate, revealing ever-deeper layers of complexity. Even the simplest person today has a more refined inner world than people of the past. If you take a writer, a poet, or an artist from 200 years ago and compare them to an ordinary person today, you will find that even a vagrant on the street has a more more refined psychological state and greater sensitivity than an intellectual from that era.

That is why we must take serious care of people today, with appropriate emotional support for doctors as part of the atmosphere of mutual concern that needs to arise. The growing problems of modern life demand it, and if we do not recognize this need, we will continue to see growing crises in medicine and throughout human society.