I believe you have a sign error in your last paragraph. Doctors who do not emotionally numb themselves are the ones considered at risk to burn out. I have a friend from one of my T groups who is a physician at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and she is now working in intensive care where the people are really messed up and people die all the time. She believes genuine loving care for her patients is her duty and makes her a better physician; she was trained be emotionally numb and she felt like it was an epiphany for herself to rebel against this after a couple of years in her current assignment.
I have not asked her if her attitude is obvious to her supervisors. My guess is that it probably is not; I do not think she is secretive about it (although she probably does not go around evangelizing to the other doctors much) but I would think that the other doctors are too preoccupied to observe it.
In the book Consciousness and Healing Larry Dossey M.D. also explicitly discusses behavioral norms of professional physicians being to minimize emotional involvement and he has arguments that this is a bad practice. (That book is not an example of good rational thinking from cover to cover.)
I believe you have a sign error in your last paragraph. Doctors who do not emotionally numb themselves are the ones considered at risk to burn out. I have a friend from one of my T groups who is a physician at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and she is now working in intensive care where the people are really messed up and people die all the time. She believes genuine loving care for her patients is her duty and makes her a better physician; she was trained be emotionally numb and she felt like it was an epiphany for herself to rebel against this after a couple of years in her current assignment.
I have not asked her if her attitude is obvious to her supervisors. My guess is that it probably is not; I do not think she is secretive about it (although she probably does not go around evangelizing to the other doctors much) but I would think that the other doctors are too preoccupied to observe it.
In the book Consciousness and Healing Larry Dossey M.D. also explicitly discusses behavioral norms of professional physicians being to minimize emotional involvement and he has arguments that this is a bad practice. (That book is not an example of good rational thinking from cover to cover.)