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Medical students should watch films that inspire compassion

Abergavenny Roger Dobson

Watching films that inspire compassion may make medical students more sympathetic to patients, more altruistic, and more understanding, a report in Families, Systems, and Health has claimed (2004;22;445-52). This "Don Quixote effect"—in which imagination overcomes reality—could be introduced into the medical curriculum to help medical students develop more compassion, kindness, and caring, by showing medical films such as Philadelphia, Wit, Terms of Endearment, and Leaving Las Vegas.

Johanna Shapiro and Lloyd Rucker claim that doctors experience different emotions when faced with the same scenario in a film compared with in a clinical setting. "It is unfortunate that the very qualities of empathy and altruism that patients long for in their physicians may be more readily manifested in the darkness of the movie theatre than under the bright lights of the exam room," say the authors.

Although doctors and medical students can be moved . . . [Full text of this article]

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This article has been cited by other articles:

• Cross, M. (2005). IT gurus attempt to win doctors' hearts and minds. BMJ 330: 276-276 [Full text]  

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