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Jan. 20, 2010
Special to World Science
Special to World Science
If you've ever felt like you've had a doctor who just didn't care, your feeling might have some basis.
Doctors tend to suppress the urge to empathize with other people's suffering, researchers have found in a brain study. But they claim this may be a good thing, as it could help the physicians focus on actually helping.
"Without emotion regulation skills, repeated exposure to the suffering of others in healthcare professionals may be associated with… personal distress, burnout and compassion fatigue," wrote Jean Decety of the University and Chicago and colleagues, authors of the study published in the Jan. 14 online issue of the journal Neuroimage.
Past research has found that watching or imagining other people in pain activates the brain's own pain centers, the group noted. Doctors' dialing down their own pain response may thus free up "cognitive resources necessary for being of assistance."
Decety and colleagues measured electrical activity in the brain from physicians, and from a matched group of non-physicians, as they watched images of body parts pricked by either a needle, or a Q-tip. The goal was to measure whether the brain would distinguish these "pain" and "no-pain" situations.
Non-physicians showed diverging brain responses to the two types of stimuli, the researchers found. The different responses occurred early in the brain processing, and showed up in brain areas known as frontal and centro-parietal regions, roughly the front and top of the scalp.
No such responses were detected in the physicians, according to the researchers, who studied electrical activity by means of electroencephalography, or electrodes placed on the scalp. "Our results indicate that emotion regulation in physicians has very early effects, inhibiting the bottom-up processing of the perception of pain in others," Decety and colleagues wrote.
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Send us a comment on this story, or send it to a friendDoctors tend to suppress the urge to empathize with other people's suffering, researchers have found in a brain study. But they claim this may be a good thing, as it could help the physicians focus on actually helping.
"Without emotion regulation skills, repeated exposure to the suffering of others in healthcare professionals may be associated with… personal distress, burnout and compassion fatigue," wrote Jean Decety of the University and Chicago and colleagues, authors of the study published in the Jan. 14 online issue of the journal Neuroimage.
Past research has found that watching or imagining other people in pain activates the brain's own pain centers, the group noted. Doctors' dialing down their own pain response may thus free up "cognitive resources necessary for being of assistance."
Decety and colleagues measured electrical activity in the brain from physicians, and from a matched group of non-physicians, as they watched images of body parts pricked by either a needle, or a Q-tip. The goal was to measure whether the brain would distinguish these "pain" and "no-pain" situations.
Non-physicians showed diverging brain responses to the two types of stimuli, the researchers found. The different responses occurred early in the brain processing, and showed up in brain areas known as frontal and centro-parietal regions, roughly the front and top of the scalp.
No such responses were detected in the physicians, according to the researchers, who studied electrical activity by means of electroencephalography, or electrodes placed on the scalp. "Our results indicate that emotion regulation in physicians has very early effects, inhibiting the bottom-up processing of the perception of pain in others," Decety and colleagues wrote.
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Eli Priyatna 16 Jun, 2011--
Source: http://basistik.blogspot.com/2011/06/scientists-docs-dont-feel-your-pain.html
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