ABSTRACT
As health professionals, we spend our workday with people who are suffering from physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and economic burdens. Human vulnerability is not an abstract concept to us – we see, hear, smell, and touch our patients’ despair and frailty. Whether consciously or not, when we decide to be health professionals, we sign up to come face to face with human suffering. This chapter describes introductory ideas about the philosophy of suffering from Western and Buddhist perspectives, and applies these perspectives to bearing witness in the clinical setting. There is a review of the latest research about the potential negative effects bearing witness can have on health professionals in the form of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma. Part of our professional development is learning to cope, in a healthy, nurturing way, with the emotions that arise when we bear witness to anguish, despair, pain, and sorrow. To that end, there is discussion of effective interventions to mitigate the expense of bearing witness to our patients’ suffering. The chapter concludes with activities which engage the reader in the experience of bearing witness to suffering.
