Okay, worst blog post title of the year. But just trying to grab your attention and point you towards a nice USA Today article on doctors and emotional intelligence.
“Tamir Mosharrafa, a plastic surgeon in Phoenix, recalls the 20-something woman who came in for liposuction. “Dani” was very lean and very pretty – and “absolutely not a candidate” for the procedure, Mosharrafa says. She’d come to his office with her mother, and Mosharrafa asked to speak to Dani alone. “I asked her, ‘Dani, what brought you here today – because it’s clearly not your physical appearance?’”
That question promoted Dani to open up about how she was chided as a middle-school student for being a little overweight. That trauma was still with her, and she cried revealing it to her doctor. “That’s where getting emotionally connected can make a difference,” Mosharrafa says.
He didn’t perform liposuction on Dani, instead referring her to someone who could discuss more at length the real source of her troubles.
Mosharrafa’s patients run the gamut of breast cancer patients who have undergone mastectomies to women who want bigger or smaller breasts. Behind all these patients are life stories and emotions that he has to learn as he learns about their bodies. “It’s impossible to operate on a perfect stranger,” he says. “In order to do it well – whether it’s making them more beautiful, or making them more whole – you really have to have an understanding of their fears and hopes.””…
(Continue reading here.)
