Bedside Manners: Can empathy be taught in medicine?

Interesting read. Some empathy (real or simulated) would be nice, but:

> Maybe that baby will die, I thought. Then I can get some sleep.

I guess the name of the baby doesn't matter, because it happened more than once, perhaps without so cinematographic circumstances. But there is no even a hint of looking at the source of the problem:

> This was only the beginning of my twenty-four-hour shift, during my second year working eighty-hour weeks.

It's insane.

Why we don't allow airplane pilots to have "twenty-four-hour shift, working eighty-hour weeks". Because sleepy people make stupid mistakes. The difference is that in an airplane the errors are registered and then people blame the pilots and the companies.

In the university, we have some T.A. with multiple courses, but we have an internal rule of no more than 6 consecutive hours. Tired people make stupid mistakes, like 1+0=0 [1]. A few typos and wrong signs are distracting, the other T.A. or the students tell the error, everything is fixed. And more importantly, even in the worst case nobody dies.

Is it possible to give a cheap insurance for "8 hours per day, 40 hours per week" and a more expensive (x10) for "24 hours per day, 80 hours per week"? It looks like selling insurance for drunk driving [2], but perhaps it's the only way to fix this mess.

[1] I have that exact errors saved in a video. We edited the video before uploading it. No natural number was harmed.

[2] Bus and truck drivers also have very strict rules about the maximum amount of hours and alcohol. Tired people make stupid mistakes.

You can probably teach the appearance of empathy but can you teach people to actually care?

Not in all my 40 years of engineering and software development