Jamison's Empathy Exams

On page four of the Empathy Exams, Jamison describes the types of doctors that she encounters as a medical actor. A medical actor is a person, normally low on cash, who portrays an ill patient as practice for physicians in training. They then grade the physician on an array of things from whether they get the correct diagnosis to empathy. Paragraphs three through four on this page illustrate this point in two examples of doctors: one who gets too immersed in the role with the fake patient and one who is too distant as if the patient is simply a business arrangement rather than someone’s life. Paragraph three tells of a student that forgets the way the medical actor/doctor in training arrangement works and exceeds what is necessary for the situation in asking questions that Jamison does not know the answer to since they were not in the patient description. This encounter is described in two sentences—one being extraordinarily longer than the other with many sentence breaks reminiscent of a
run-on similar to the way that this student is engaging far more than necessary or wanted. She is then forced to fake the interaction in an over exaggerated way with “slapping my knee”(Jamison 4). Paragraph four tells of a student that is the exact opposite in his business like demeanor. He is not focused on her feelings rather than his own task “…rattle through the clinical checklist for depression like a list of things they need to get at the grocery store.” Contrary to paragraph three this paragraph is formulated in a way that is very short with its sentences only stating the facts like a business deal. This student maintains that he needs to do his job and no more with forced eye contact “wrestling me into eye contact is the way they maintain power – forcing me to acknowledge their requisite display of care.” In this, the student is able to feel as though he did his part in expressing empathy while doing no such thing. In describing the two types of doctors like this she exposes the juxtaposition between them in that although they both approach empathy in drastically differing ways, neither suffice.
One is too invested into the patient supplying extraneous details in a situation where that is harmful and the other is emotionally distant in a situation where the patient needs someone to be there for them. Not once does Jamison detail an experience where a doctor in training handled the pseudo case with the appropriate amount of empathy, which leads one to believe that there may not be one. There is no way for someone to accurately and truly be able to empathize with another, so the doctors are always lacking in this area. This foreshadows Jamison’s own experiences late on in the story and the lack of empathy she felt from her own doctors both for her abortion and unrelated heart surgery; what she did feel from her doctors lacked compassion and was never enough to make her feel empathized
with.