The Enduring Wisdom of Franz Ingelfinger

On May 5, 1977, Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, delivered the George W. Gay lecture on medical ethics at Harvard Medical School. I was in full time practice at the time and, alas, was not at the lecture.

Dr. Ingelfinger, one of the world's experts on esophageal cancer, had developed the disease he had taught so many others about. Here's what he tells us with regard to the difficult question of whether to undergo chemotherapy and radiation after surgery:

I received from physician friends throughout the country a barrage of well-intentioned but contradictory advice. As a result, not only I, but my wife, my son and daughter-in-law (both doctors), and other family members became increasingly confused and emotionally distraught. Finally...one wise physician friend said, "What you need is a doctor." He was telling me to forget the information I already had and the information I was receiving from many quarters, and to seek instead a person who would...tell me what to do, who would in a paternalistic manner assume responsibility for my care. When that excellent advice was followed, my family and I sensed immediate and immense relief."

Yesterday I spoke with a dear friend whose spouse is suffering from a profoundly serious medical condition that calls for complex clinical, psychosocial and financial decisions. My friend reported "if I had a dollar for every time I was asked - 'what should we do about XYZ' - there would be no financial problems to deal with!" My friend described feeling "you are the doctor - what do you think we should do?"

My friend was encountering a common medical ethics dilemma. We physicians are taught to provide "patient-centered" care, to "respect patient and family autonomy" and to avoid "paternalism." But as Dr. Ingelfinger described so poignantly, in the context of serious illness, patients and families also need support and guidance. Physicians need to develop communication skills that allow us to thread between respecting autonomy and providing structure and guidance.

There's no single right answer as to how to do this. I often found it helpful to (a) elicit the patient's goals and values, (b) give my view of what course of action these goals and values called for, but then (c) check on whether, from the patient's perspective, I'd gotten it right.

Over the years with medical students and residents I've often quoted Muhammad Ali's philosophy of boxing: "float like a butterfly/sting like a bee." Ali's eight-word formula conveys the need to embrace and integrate ostensibly incompatible components. Doing this takes experience. It also takes time.

I don't know if my friend's physicians felt rushed. My brilliant colleague Dr. Amy Ship recently wrote about how limited time constrains us in our efforts to be the best we can with patients and families. But whether or not time was a factor for my friend's physicians, Dr. Ingelfinger's guidance from his own experience as a patient holds true forty-one years after his lecture.

(Dr. Ingelfinger's lecture, published in 1980 after his death, is available here. "Physicians as counsellors," a previous post on a related topic, is here. )

Transmission of Values within a Profession

Last night I had the pleasure and privilege of having an extended conversation about medical ethics with Laurie Patton, president of Middlebury College. I was surprised when Laurie expressed great interest in my experience teaching medical ethics. Was she just being polite? It turned out to be much more than that.

Laurie explained that two months ago she’d invoked the Hippocratic oath and the influence of her surgeon father in an essay titled “Our Moral Directive,” in which she argued that “a Middlebury education should be accessible to all, regardless of financial means.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

My father is a retired cardiovascular thoracic surgeon. My childhood memories are punctuated with instances of him being called away from home for emergency surgeries. On those days, and many others over his long career, he never questioned whether the patients whose lives he was trying to save were able to pay for his services. He had taken the [Hippocratic] oath to heal to the best of his ability all those who presented themselves—and he spent his career doing so…In higher education, we don’t—yet—have our own official version of the Hippocratic oath. But at Middlebury, we do have a mission that serves as our moral directive… 

Our conversation and her essay conveyed a crucial insight into what it means to be part of a profession. As professionals we profess values imbibed from our teachers. Laurie invokes two - her father and Hippocrates. She treasures stories her father told about nurses in the operating room who saved him from making mistakes. From those stories she took lessons about respect for competent women, humility about one’s own expertise, and teamwork to serve patients.

Out of curiosity I Googled “Dr Patton cardiovascular surgeon.” What I found reinforced the lesson about transmission of values within a profession. In college Dr. Patton broke his collar bone playing hockey. Two of his moral influences were the surgeons who took care of him – their empathy, competence, positive attitude and the pleasure they took in their work. And in an essay of his own, Dr. Patton tells the story of Dr. Daniel Fiske Jones, a noted surgeon who graduated from Harvard Medical School 62 years before Dr. Patton did. The subtext of the story is that Dr. Patton is guided by the same values that guided Dr. Jones.

In my first year of medical school I experienced the process of value transmission directly. I was in a tutorial group that met with Dr. William Castle, a distinguished hematologist. Dr. Castle, who was 63 at the time, described the following dialogue from when he interned at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the early 1920s:

Teacher: Dr. Castle, if you had a patient with pneumonia, and you did ABCD, but the patient died, how would you feel?

 

Dr. Castle: I would feel terrible!

 

Teacher: Dr. Castle - if you persist in feeling that way, you will have to leave medicine. You would have done everything that we are able to do at this time. You will have to learn to govern your emotions! (reconstructed from my memory)

Dr. Castle was a gentle, compassionate man who I admired. Over the years his story has led me to reflect on the challenge of how to be close enough to our patients to feel love for them, and at the same time to have enough internal "insulation" to maintain our own stability when our patients do not do well.

Laurie Patton is applying the values professed by her surgeon father. I reflect with my own students about the values Dr. Castle's teachers tried to pass on to him almost 100 years ago. 

That's a large element of what professions are all about!

How not to handle conscientious objection

On the evening of June 21, Nicole Mone Arteaga went to Walgreen's Pharmacy in Peoria, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix) to fill a prescription for misoprostol. The 9 week fetus in her longed-for pregnancy had no heartbeat, and the pregnancy would end in a miscarriage. She chose a medical rather than surgical removal of the non-viable fetal tissue.

When she arrived at the pharmacy, staff pharmacist Brian Hreniuc asked if she was pregnant. On hearing the answer he told her his "ethical beliefs" forbade him from filling the prescription. According to Ms. Arteaga's Facebook post her 7 year old and five customers could hear the exchange. The result: "I left Walgreens in tears, ashamed and feeling humiliated by a man who knows nothing of my struggles but feels it is his right to deny medication prescribed to me by my doctor."

Next day Ms. Arteaga was able to fill the prescription at another branch of Walgreen's. 

Arizona law allows pharmacists to exercise conscience as Mr. Hreniuc did. And while reflective individuals differ on whether professional responsibility to serve one's patients or individual conscience should rule in situations like this, my Catholic friends have helped me understand how for Mr. Hreniuc, filling the prescription could make him feel complicit in what he might see as a mortal sin. But as experienced by Ms. Arteaga, he did not communicate in the right way.

Here's what needed to be done. (1) "I'm so sorry for what you are going through." (2) "I have to refer you to another pharmacy/pharmacist." (3) "I want to wish you the best for the future." The conversation should have been private, not audible to others. The tone should be warm, caring and apologetic, not self-righteous. Ideally, Walgreen’s would have systems in place so that patients would not encounter pharmacists who were not willing to fill their prescriptions. And for those like Mr. Hreniuc, there should be rigorous training in how to communicate in a manner that respects the needs of patients as well as the conscience claims of the staff.

It's not impossible that Mr. Hreniuc conducted himself this way. The pain of the situation could have prevented Ms. Arteaga from experiencing an effort at compassion. I know from experience that this can happen. Many years ago I came upon a distraught couple at the health center where I worked. They had just received bad news. The husband had cancer. I had recently taken a course on dealing with bad news. I sat down with the couple and spoke with them. I'm reasonably confident that a videotape would have shown that I applied what I had learned.

A week or two later a letter of complaint came to the administrator of the health center (me) from the couple. The letter described the cold, cruel person they had encountered (me). For me it was a chastening lesson in the potential difference between what is intended and said by the clinician and heard by the patient.

Arizona state Sen. John Kavanagh, co-sponsor of the 2009 law that allows pharmacists to refuse to fill abortion or emergency-contraceptive prescriptions based on moral or religious beliefs, showed a shameful defensiveness and lack of empathy in his comments on Ms. Arteaga's experience:

He said he was surprised that Arteaga wasn't more sympathetic with the pharmacist, given that she eventually was able to get the medicine from another Walgreen's location. "What's the problem?" he said. "She got what she wanted. The pharmacist complied with the law. I don't see why she doesn't respect the pharmacist's right to not do this," he said.

In her Facebook post Ms. Arteaga shows an admirable understanding of the situation: "I get it, we all have our beliefs." She appears to accept the issue of conscience but rightfully does not accept the way the conscience exception was carried out. In her response - a public post and a complaint to Walgreen's management - she is being an ideal advocate. Her complaint gives Walgreen's, and  professionals who might invoke conscience in not offering a medically indicated legal service, guidance in how to conduct themselves in a more ethically admirable manner.