The DOI matches its Crossref record; 66 of the 66 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Inner Life of Physicians and Care of the Seriously Ill
Abstract
Seriously ill persons are emotionally vulnerable during the typically protracted course of an illness. Physicians respond to such patients' needs and emotions with emotions of their own, which may reflect a need to rescue the patient, a sense of failure and frustration when the patient's illness progresses, feelings of powerlessness against illness and its associated losses, grief, fear of becoming ill oneself, or a desire to separate from and avoid patients to escape these feelings. These emotions can affect both the quality of medical care and the physician's own sense of well-being, since unexamined emotions may also lead to physician distress, disengagement, burnout, and poor judgment. In this article, which is intended for the practicing, nonpsychiatric clinician, we describe a model for increasing physician self-awareness, which includes identifying and working with emotions that may affect patient care. Our approach is based on the standard medical model of risk factors, signs and symptoms, differential diagnosis, and intervention. Although it is normal to have feelings arising from the care of patients, physicians should take an active role in identifying and controlling those emotions.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Educating the reflective practitioner
Schön, D. A. (1987) · Cited by 11,326
The Doctor, His Patient, and the Illness
(1957) · Postgraduate Medical Journal · doi:10.1136/pgmj.33.382.417-a · Cited by 1,268
Increasing incidence of withholding and withdrawal of life support from the critically ill.
Prendergast, T. J., & Luce, J. M. (1997) · American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine · doi:10.1164/ajrccm.155.1.9001282 · Cited by 730
How To Break Bad News: A Guide for Health Care Professionals
Buckman, R. (1992) · University of Toronto Press eBooks · doi:10.3138/9781487596989 · Cited by 646
Burnout and psychiatric disorder among cancer clinicians
Ramirez, A., Graham, J., Richards, M., Cull, A., Gregory, W., Leaning, M., Snashall, D., & Timothy, A. (1995) · British Journal of Cancer · doi:10.1038/bjc.1995.244 · Cited by 620
Decisions near the end of life: professional views on life-sustaining treatments.
Solomon, M. Z., O'Donnell, L., Jennings, B., Guilfoy, V, Wolf, S. M., Nolan, K., Jackson, R., Koch-Weser, D., & Donnelley, S. (1993) · American Journal of Public Health · doi:10.2105/ajph.83.1.14 · Cited by 582
Collusion in doctor-patient communication about imminent death: an ethnographic study
The, A.-M., Hak, T., Koeter, G., & van der Wal, G. (2000) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.321.7273.1376 · Cited by 533
Countertransference Hate in the Treatment of Suicidal Patients
Maltsberger, J. T. (1974) · Archives of General Psychiatry · doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1974.01760110049005 · Cited by 480
Calibrating the Physician: Personal Awareness and Effective Patient Care
Novack, D. H. (1997) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.1997.03550060078040 · Cited by 448
Some Psychologic Vulnerabilities of Physicians
Vaillant, G. E., Sobowale, N. C., & McArthur, C. (1972) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejm197208242870802 · Cited by 429
Cited by
Wright, A. A. (2008) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.300.14.1665 · Cited by 2,788
“Physicians also often avoid these conversations, communicate euphemistically, are overly optimistic, or delay discussions until patients are close to death, perhaps because their own feelings of failure or loss.(4,5,10,13,47,48) Consistent with this hypothesis, patients with lower Karnofsky scores, higher symptom burd…”
Executive Leadership and Physician Well-being
Shanafelt, T. D., & Noseworthy, J. H. (2017) · Mayo Clinic Proceedings · doi:10.1016/j.mayocp.2016.10.004 · Cited by 1,776
Shanafelt, T. D., Sloan, J. A., & Habermann, T. M. (2003) · The American Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1016/s0002-9343(03)00117-7 · Cited by 813
How Do Distress and Well-being Relate to Medical Student Empathy? A Multicenter Study
Thomas, M. R., Dyrbye, L. N., Huntington, J. L., Lawson, K. L., Novotny, P. J., Sloan, J. A., & Shanafelt, T. D. (2007) · Journal of General Internal Medicine · doi:10.1007/s11606-006-0039-6 · Cited by 616
Burnout and Doctors: Prevalence, Prevention and Intervention
Kumar, S. (2016) · Healthcare · doi:10.3390/healthcare4030037 · Cited by 560
Metadata
- Authors
- Meier, D. E.
- Venue
- JAMA
- Publisher
- American Medical Association (AMA)
- Published
- 2001-12-19
- Volume
- 286
- Issue
- 23
- Pages
- 3007
- ISSN
- 0002-9955 (ISSN-L)
- 0098-7484
- OpenAlex
- W2171150899
- Cited by
- 675
- References
- 66
- FWCI
- 34.55
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Inner Life of Physicians and Care of the Seriously Ill. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1001/jama.286.23.3007
- The paper
- Meier, D. E. (2001). The Inner Life of Physicians and Care of the Seriously Ill. JAMA. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.286.23.3007
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
