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What Cannot Be Undone: True Stories of a Life in Medicine by Walter M. Robinson

March 25, 2022 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

What Cannot Be Undone: True Stories of a Life in Medicine by Walter M. Robinson was published early this year by the University of New Mexico Press.

Our training as physicians teaches us to bury our emotions, to remain objective and detached, and it has become clear that patients can perceive doctors as lacking empathy by hiding this aspect of themselves. The complexities of this dynamic are explored in Walter M. Robinson’s What Cannot Be Undone: True Stories of a Life in Medicine, a collection of essays examining the self-destructive results of detachment from the physician’s emotional responses, published recently by the University of New Mexico Press. When physicians cannot tolerate the pain and suffering of their inner life, compassion-fatigue, burnout, substance abuse and suicide are possibilities.

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In Caregiving, Creative non-fiction, Essays, Health, Hospitals, Narrative Medicine, Memoir Tags doctor burnout, patients and doctors, doctor stories, narrative medicine, illness

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