PROVIDER PERSPECTIVE:
Art Chen (5)
Text Transcript

On the other hand, I think what we are dealing with in "isms" and struggling with our "isms" and our development and evolution as real human beings is a questioning of any assumptions that we can make. Just today, when I heard the comment about smiling being universal, and that resonated with me. Then I go and hear a couple of our colleagues and all of a sudden, maybe it isn't universal. The same thing with love, universally if we can work from a place from love for our fellow human beings, then that's universal. Well maybe it isn't. And treating someone like your mother--what if you came from a broken family and unfortunate circumstances where there was an abusive mother or father.

I give up! I really give up! I'm thinking I don't know anything because these basic assumptions that we hold true as... -they call them noble truths, we have to constantly question whether or not we really do know what we think we know. And with those few processes in operation, I think for us as clinicians, it makes it very difficult to come up with the training. Instead I think as many of us have experienced, it's more like a lifetime journey and a lifetime process. And every step of the way, as long as we're committed to understanding that there is a lot we will never understand, a lot we don't know, but that we're committed to learning, and continuing to learn, from anybody, whoever they might be-patients, colleagues, people from different spheres. I think that is probably the most difficult undertaking for us in a lifelong curriculum of* competence? consciousness?