ABSTRACT
Medicine’s historically accrued key ailments – intolerance of ambiguity, resistance to democratic habits, unintended production of insensibility, and lack of psychotherapeutic acumen amongst medical students and junior doctors (also resulting in poor self-care) – may be addressed through tailored medical humanities interventions. A warning is offered however: the more we challenge ingrained bad habits in medical education, the more we enter territories of uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity. Intolerance for these conditions is a trait of authority regimes courting hierarchical arrangements of power. A model is presented for developing democratic habits and structures to counter such longstanding and stubborn medical-cultural traits. While recognising that pressures on doctors’ working lives are often due to lack of resources, medical culture is also insistently self-punitive, based on a heroic work ethic. But medical education does not provide the psychotherapeutic acumen to adequately care for self and others, and to communicate well in potentially supportive, collaborative clinical team settings. Central to this failure is that medical education does not improve sensibility but dulls senses and feelings through emotional insulation. Such systematic an-aesthetising must be addressed.
