John Macdonald MD on Wellbeing

Well-being is not certainly in medicine exclusive to wound care, but well-being is an essential part, the well-being of the patient is essential part of every single aspect of medicine. And I think that one of the things that you need to do or we need to do is to begin developing the concept of well-being very early in the careers of the nurses and the careers of the medical students and let them know that the the art of medicine is still an art and so much of whether the patient does well or whether you help the patient is going to be how you make the patient feel. Not so much how you make the patient's heartbeat better, how you make the patient walk better, but how you make the patient feel. And it's important that in this day and age when we have so many scientific advances, when a patient can walk into a clinic and immediately have blood tests or biopsies or CT scans or MRIs, that we not begin to turn the patient into an Apple computer or an iPhone, that we remember who this patient is as a human being and remember that sometimes you bring healing, but most of the time you bring hope, and the way you bring hope is through patient well-being. And you say, well, what does that mean? Well, it means by getting back to the, it's very simple. It's getting back to the golden rule. You treat the patient as you would want to be treated yourself. You treat the patient as a fellow human being who you might be able to heal. You might be able to heal the wound, but the most important thing is you want to work to make that patient walk out of the clinic or be in the hospital, and when you leave, have some better sense of who they are and how their quality of life is proceeding. We forget that sometimes the most important thing is the touch of your hand, the return of a phone call, a prejudiced opinion silenced, a quick, accurate diagnosis that you give to the patient with compassion. And what does compassion mean? Compassion is a combination of the words with suffering. You share in the suffering of the patient. You don't let the patient see that you're suffering, but you accept some of the pain of the patient. And you begin to make the patient understand that they are involved, that you are involved in their disease process, but you also must make them feel that they are involved in their process. But wound care people have a personality that elevates the soul of medicine. You don't go into wound care unless you understand the human being, unless you understand suffering, unless you understand things that nobody wants to take care of. And I think that the wound care people are the ones to give this message, because we, I think, understand better than most other clinicians what it is to make a patient feel better for the most simplest of reasons. And therefore, I think well-being is appropriate. I think it's something that gets back to the golden rule. And I think that it's something that is at the very heart of being a nurse, being a physician, just being a human being.