Some of you may remember Tina Turner's hit What's Love Got to Do With It? In the song she sings that "love is a second hand emotion," and "who needs a heart when a heart can be broken." The song is a cynical take on loving and being loved. Many physicians and health care providers have become cynical and disillusioned. Medicine and love are almost never mentioned in the same breath. The practice of medicine is not necessarily viewed as a relationship with love at its center, but a transaction from the patient's viewpoint that is too often one sided. Health care providers are taught to be objective and to exhibit "detached concern." We are taught to protect ourselves from our own emotions as well as those of the patient. We know that love is fraught with pain and unpredictability. We don't want our hearts to be broken. We don't want to be overwhelmed by love and unable to act.
But, what if we stopped protecting our hearts so much? What if we looked at our patients with the same love that we reserve for our children, spouse, or our friends? After all, there really are not different kinds or degrees of love. Love is caring or loving another as you love yourself. Love is relieving the suffering of another. What would practicing medicine be like then? Can we practice with what Jack Coulehan calls "tenderness and steadiness." Can we stop hiding behind the shield of our white coats, and share our humanity with our patients? When we do, when we can sit and converse with our patients as human being to human being, and not expert to patient, then maybe, the practice of medicine will be more fulfilling. Maybe, when love has everything to do with it, when health care providers no longer fear the risk of their hearts being broken, then health care will be what it is meant to be, a loving relationship, for both doctor and patient.