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Showing posts with the label empathy

The Absurdity of Death & Divorce and the Importance of Professional Optimism

I recently discovered Reply All , which is a podcast that explores interesting and amazing stories about the internet.  I've been listening to past episodes and today I discovered Episode #2: The Secret, Gruesome Internet For Doctors , which focuses on the existence of an app for doctors called Figure One.  Figure One is essentially an Instagram of gruesome photos of bodily diseases and injuries posted by doctors, potentially for educational purposes but mostly just for story sharing.  What's really interesting about this app is how normal it seems to doctors and how abnormal/gross/scary it is to everyone else. There are professions, like soldier or doctor, that deal with death and the fragility of life on such a regular basis that it becomes normal to them.  This creates a disconnect between what feels normal to a doctor and what feels normal to a patient.  The doctor has faced the absurdity of death in a way that the rest of us try to remain igno...