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A Dance with Mrs. Chan
Abraar Karan
What This Study Found In this essay, a medical student reflects on the most important lesson he learned during his internal medicine clerkship -- that a patient is more than his disease. While much of medicine is spent evaluating patients' vital signs and laboratory results, the sign most vital to care is how much time clinicians actually spend caring. The author asserts that physicians cannot fully appreciate how a patient is doing if they don�t first appreciate who patients are and what matters to them. Relating a story of how this important lesson later guided him to help another patient who was emotionally overcome by his disease, the author writes that paying attention to the little things is one of the most important things a physician can do to truly change how patients feel � and that is a very big thing.
