Empathy

I remember once reading somewhere something from someone. It was about the beauty of our fellow man. It was about his actual divine nature. It was sometihng sort of like this: "If we were to see the divinity within each other we could do nothing but bow down before our fellow man." Obviously, my mind is failing us on the details. Nonetheless, the essence of the thought remains couched inside the vague notion of what I once read. Looking very deeply into others we know well we at times can see their "divine nature". (It's harder with some people than with others.) But what does this mean for our empathy for others. There is this issue of many (is it most?) men living out their lives in quiet desperation. There is a great discrepency. We have divine creatures living out their lives in desperation. They aren't recognized any more for their divinity or their unique and inherent value. We no longer (as a culture, that is) appreciate a good person the way we appreciate a good orchid. How is this possible if the person is a divine entity? Certainly there is no shortage of suffering.
If we proceed with empathy towards everyone we meet then there is this sea of suffering that comes in. This is hard to deal with internally. Yesterday I saw sixteen people. One or two at most had what I call a "reasonable degree of happiness." This isn't to say that I can sit here and say: "That person was truly happy." I just can say that they had a "reasonable degree." The rest of them are suffering some or suffering a lot. That is the way the patients were yesterday. That is the way that the patients usually are.
So physicians have no choice but to lose empathy. It is hard to continue to see these people and feel for their suffering for ten years. Of course, seeing sixteen people in a day is ridiculous. These days physicians see thirty at least and sometimes as many as eighty people a day! There are physicians who see eighty people a day! Forty is typical. This is mind boggling to me. However, it can be understood if you know that they don't see any PEOPLE. Certainly they never get a chance of glimpsing into their divine nature. In fact, they rarely even know the people they treat. They only know a disease state. "Here comes the gallbladder." "Here comes the diabetes." It's a way to survive the "practice of medicine". It's a way to get through the system (mostly in quiet desperation). There's very little empathy left in medicine these days. Patients come to see physicians because they are suffering; so they need empathy.
It's interesting to see all of the discussions about "quality of care" and "healthcare costs". Patients need to have tests because when a doctor orders a test it means he cares. Patients need to have tests done because they can't trust the doctor to be right if the doctor doesn't even seem to care about them, or if she is seeing eighty people a day. Doctors want to put patients throught tests to generate more money because they don't really care about the people that they can't even see if there isn't empathy. The physicians are unhappy because they don't have a connection, because they can't because if they did, they would drown in the sea of despair. But no one is talking about the real issue - the lack of empathy in our "medicine".