The distress that Will Bynum later recognized as shame settled over him nearly immediately.
Bynum, then in his second year of residency training as a family medicine physician, was wrapping up a long shift when he was called into an emergency delivery. To save the baby’s life, he used a vacuum device, which applies suction to assist with rapid delivery.
The baby emerged unharmed. But the mother suffered a severe vaginal tear that required surgical repair by an obstetrician. Soon afterward, Bynum retreated to an empty hospital room, trying to process his feelings about the unexpected complication.
“I didn’t want to see anybody. I didn’t want anybody to find me,” said Bynum, now an associate professor of family medicine at Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina. “It was a really primitive response.”
Shame is a common and highly uncomfortable human emotion. In the years since that pivotal incident, Bynum has become a leading voice among clinicians and researchers who argue that the intense crucible of medical training can amplify shame in future doctors.
He is now part of an emerging effort to teach what he describes as “shame competence” to medical school students and practicing physicians. While shame can’t be eliminated, Bynum and his research colleagues maintain that related skills and practices can be developed to reduce the culture of shame and foster a healthier way to engage with it.
Without this approach, they argue, tomorrow’s doctors won’t recognize and address the emotion in themselves and others. And thus, they risk transmitting it to their patients, even inadvertently, which …