Takeaway
In my medical training in Brazil, I learned to live by Theodore Roosevelt’s quotation, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care."
Connecting with Patients | October 12, 2023 | 1 min read
By Thiago Mendes, MD, University of Pittsburgh
The patient was concerned with her lab results and asked, “What do I have?”
I replied I didn’t know but made it clear that we were on this journey toward health together.
Every system has its peculiarities, so it’s not a surprise that healthcare is different in every country. However, with the globalization of diagnostic tests and treatments, the main difference in medical care across the globe is how we spend our time with patients and with the healthcare team.
In Brazil, we spend more time with patients than in the U.S. We pull up a chair, we sit, we talk. In our training, we start with a light workload, so that we can more thoroughly assess patients. This gave me a sense of humbleness and being comfortable with the unknown. We’re also trained to look patients in the eye, to make eye contact as much as possible. This is the culture we are exposed to right away during residency.
Spending more time with patients and engaging in daily informal discussions and debates with colleagues about medical literature and patient diagnoses translates to building genuine and trusting relationships with patients and coworkers.
The best lesson I got from my training in Brazil is the incorporation of the famous Theodore Rosevelt quotation, even though I had never heard about it at that time: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Medicine is an evolving field that requires learning new things every day. The motivation to continue this challenging journey comes from caring deeply for patients and embarking in open and honest discussions with other physicians who reciprocate our concern and care.
“Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”—Teddy Roosevelt
This piece expresses the views solely of the author. It does not necessarily represent the views of any organization, including Johns Hopkins Medicine.