I grew up hearing stories of my great grandfather. As a doctor in a small town, he was something of a local legend. He was the old fashioned kind of physician who worked out of an office in his home and was always willing to make house calls. He truly cared about the patient.

Too many times, professionalism gets in the way of patient care in the healthcare industry. One major concern is the lack of quality in patient care in order to increase quantity. If a doctor can treat a single patient in fifteen minutes instead of thirty, he can treat twice as many patients. This logic is solid until you take into account the loss in the worth of that care. The numbers show a greater efficiency (assumed to mean that more patients are being cared for) so it would seem reasonable that doctors should work at this increased rate of patients, however, there are negative effects on the doctors’ involvement in the patients care.

The movie Wit confronts the issue of compassion in medicine by examining the ordeal faced by a professor when she is diagnosed and treated for ovarian cancer. Throughout the stages of the disease, she encounters only doctors with a scientific detachment. She becomes more of a test subject than an equal human being. The humility of the disease and the seeming uncaring attitude of the physicians treating her lead to her ultimate loss: the loss of her dignity.

Compassion in Medicine suggests that it is time for doctors to bring compassion into the field. It adapts a “specifically tailored Tibetan Buddhist philosophy to the needs of Western doctors, nurses, and other caregivers.” (xv) It is time that doctors are again driven by the desire to help their patients through a sympathetic understanding in addition to medical skill and knowledge.

Compassion is “the wish to alleviate suffering” (30) Doctors, however, are systematically trained to get rid of compassion. “This compassion-stifling milieu has been dubbed ‘the hidden curriculum,’ because it conveys the unspoken message to get on with it—that students actually receive during their medical training.” (5)

Nevertheless, “intelligently caring for patients means finding the right solution to their problem.” (35) This includes all aspects of physician care from drug treatment to the attention and attitude of the doctor towards the patient.