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
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