Tag: compassion

Gretchen Winter

As a physician-in-training, I find joy in helping to ease pain and occasionally cure illness. But I often find my greatest sense of purpose in helping patients to heal emotionally, whether by allaying a patient’s fears, addressing a lingering concern or lending a listening ear.

Having majored in communications in college, I’d assumed that the patient-physician relationship would be the easy part of medicine. I’ve learned, though, that getting it right isn’t always easy.

An encounter with a patient named Mary Collins brought this lesson home to me. 

As a third-year medical student, just finishing the third week of my family medicine clerkship at a community health center, I was starting to feel competent at performing the basic history and exam. 

It was