The Role of the Medical Interview in the Physician’s Search for Meaning

Abstract

Other chapters in this book address the medical interview as a tool for responding to patients’ needs. This chapter considers how the medical interview satisfies some clinicians’ needs. The very topic may seem heretical. After all, the principle of beneficence, a cornerstone of medical ethics, insists that we always put the patient’s interests ahead of our own. Unfortunately, this is generally misinterpreted to mean that only the patient’s interests and needs may be addressed and that the mere acknowledgment of our own is inappropriate. But if responding to the patient’s needs does not at some level meet our own needs as well, we will soon find it difficult to sustain our commitment to clinical practice. In this chapter, we intend to pull back a corner of the curtain on the forbidden topic of clinicians’ needs to address one need in particular—the need for meaning—as it arises and is satisfied in the medical encounter.