It’s Not You, It’s Me: Learning to Navigate the Patient-Physician Relationship

The Article in Brief

It's Not You, It's Me: Learning to Navigate the Patient-Physician Relationship

Melissa B. Hill

Background Melissa B. Hill, BS, a medical student at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, writes a first-person narrative about her relationship with a pregnant patient with whom she connected while participating in a medical school program supporting expectant mothers with limited support systems during their pregnancies.

What This Study Found Hill writes that, though she learned in her preclinical “doctoring” courses how to build quick connections with patients, her training didn’t teach her how to manage meaningful, emotionally complex connections she might form with patients during longitudinal rotations. She notes how she invested an “enormous amount of time and invested a great deal emotionally” following and supporting the pregnant patient but lacked guidelines on how to end the partnership, causing her to feel like she was abandoning a good friend. As Hill reflects on the end of this particular relationship, she writes that she learned to appreciate the power of the longitudinal physician-patient relationship and that taking care of patients also requires that she take care of herself.