Issue Home Volume 11: Issue 4

Diabetic for a Week
Genevieve Del Rosario, MHS, PA-C
Assistant Professor
Doisy College of Health Sciences
Department of Physician Assistant Education

It is easy to see how Jesuit values are paramount to our students’ educations and careers in medicine. Young men and women spend years of their lives becoming trained to recognize illness, diagnose disease, and heal the sick. Unfortunately, sometimes students and clinicians fall short of the value of cura personalis – the care of the whole person. Clinicians become so used to treating illness that they sometimes forget to treat the person as well. Years of education with a focus on critical thinking has a tendency to make one, well, critical. It is the rare clinician who hasn’t thought on occasion, “If I had that condition, I would be taking much better care of myself. Why won’t the patient just listen to me?”

Graduate students in the department of physician assistant education now explore this issue from the patient’s perspective. During their course on endocrinology, students are given the diagnosis of diabetes for a week. During that week, they must check their blood sugar three times a day and carefully monitor their diet, writing down everything they consume.

The students start the week cheerful and excited, curious to see how their lunch or their workout will affect their blood sugar. By the end of the week, however, they’re sick of it. They forget to bring their glucometers with them during the day; they don’t want to write down that midnight snack; they are embarrassed to check their blood sugar when they are out with their “nondiabetic” friends.

All of this is discussed in reflection papers students hand in at the end of the week. They are grateful to be done, and perhaps a bit more grateful for their usual good health. It is our hope that they will take this experience with them into their practices and be more empathetic and cognizant of the whole person before them. This exercise encourages them to consider their patients’ emotional reactions to their health conditions, as well as the different practical barriers they may face. While looking holistically at people is much more challenging than simply managing diagnoses on a chart, it is one of the reasons medicine is so rewarding, allowing profound growth to occur throughout a clinician’s career.

Last updated 04.28.09