Market, Gift, Everyday Ethics, and Emmanuel Levinas in Patient Care

Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology essay, “Market, Gift, Everyday Ethics, and Emmanuel Levinas in Patient Care” by Alan Astrow, Chief of the Hematology and Medical Oncology division at the New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Hello, and welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology, which features essays and personal reflections from authors exploring their experience in the field of oncology. I'm your host, Dr. Lidia Schapira, Associate Editor for Art of Oncology and a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. Today we are joined by Dr. Alan Astrow, Chief of the Hematology and Medical Oncology division at the New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. In this episode, we will be discussing his Art of Oncology article, "Market, Gift, Everyday Ethics, and the Emmanuel Levinas in Patient Care." 

At the time of this recording, our guest has no disclosures. 

Alan, welcome to our podcast, and thank you for joining us. 

Dr. Alan Astrow: Thank you for inviting me.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Your article has a very long title, and we've got Markets and Gifts and Ethics and a philosopher. So let's start by helping our listeners and maybe our readers to really understand the intention of this essay. What is the message of the essay?

Dr. Alan Astrow: The message of the essay is that we need to be reflecting and be mindful of the values that underlie medical care as we practice every day. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: And if I were to quiz you a little bit on that and push a little bit, what are those values? And how does perhaps market conflict with ethics and mission?

Dr. Alan Astrow: Trust, caring, honesty, thoroughness, dedication to the patient, focus on the patient and the patient's needs. The problem with market or the danger of market is that it can sometimes distract us from focusing on the patient and that patient's needs.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: So how would you respond to somebody who says, but we need organization, we need markets and finances in order to have a system that provides health care? Where do you see the front of conflict, perhaps between those who are more mission-driven, as you've just beautifully articulated and have the trust in the patient's care front and center, and those who are more concerned with the productiveness and efficiency in collections?

Dr. Alan Astrow: I have tremendous respect for my administrative colleagues who are focused on keeping hospitals solvent. I worked at a hospital earlier in my career that was not focused as it needed to be on making sure the hospital had a sound strategic plan. And that hospital is now condominiums. So, absolutely, we need to be aware of financial realities and hospitals need to pay their bills. But underlying that, we can't think that the first mission of a hospital is to earn money. The first mission of a hospital is to provide service to those in need. And then our colleagues in administration have to help us find ways to do that in a manner that's financially responsible. But we think first of the patient and that patient's needs. 

And patients understand that. Patients don't want the hospitals to go bankrupt, and patients want their doctors and nurses to be paid. Patients do worry sometimes, with good reason I think, that the system may be overly focused - that's the issue, it's an issue of balance - overly focused on markets, overly focused on finance. It seems as if we're living in a world in which money is driving everything. Money is speaking with too loud a voice. That's the issue. Money is important. But the needs of the patient and what our mission is to patients have to be the driving force of the hospital. That has to be the predominant voice, the loudest voice. Markets should be serving the patient and the patient's needs, not the other way around.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: I think I understand that clearly. But now let's talk about the gift that's in the title, and that, in my mind, was a very imaginative way of presenting what we bring that is not just a service. Talk a little bit about how you understand the gift of presence or the gift of caring. 

Dr. Alan Astrow: The gift is when you're really lost in the task itself. When you're really focused on that patient in front of you and trying to understand the patient and trying to address the concerns that the patient has. And during those moments when you're focused on that patient, you're not thinking about money. No, you should not be. But the first predominant impulse needs to be what the underlying mission of that organization is. And in medicine, it's caring for the patient. 

And so, for example, when we hear administrators saying we're going to reach out to this and that market, well, that to me shows a mistaken focus. We understand that the hospitals need to raise money from banks and other places in order to make needed capital investments. But we need to think first and foremost about the people in the communities we serve, and then the markets should be at the service of people and communities. I think in general, it's a larger issue. The power of money is speaking in too dominant, in a way, in too many aspects of our world. And medicine, above all, needs to resist that. And there's a manner in which healthcare institutions are functioning these days which I think leads patients to have reason to doubt. And so if they have doubts about what our primary interests are, they will lose trust. And the loss of trust is devastating to the medical relationship.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Let me explore that a little bit with you, Alan. I would say that in my mind, providing that caring presence is part of the mission of medicine, but you talk about a dimension of gift. Help me and our listeners and readers understand a little bit more about the gift. You talk about the gift being something that's exchanged, that there's even a reciprocity in giving and receiving gifts. How are we to understand that perhaps through the lens of the philosophers and the big thinkers here?

Dr. Alan Astrow: I'm borrowing this from Lewis Hyde. He was referring to a traditional gift economy. And according to Hyde, who is taking this from cultural anthropologists, that in many tribal communities, tribal societies, just, for example, in the Native American cultures in our land that were not cash-based, they're based upon a notion of gift. You would provide a gift to the other without any expectation of payment, but there was a passive understanding that at some point that gift would be returned to you. And that's how these societies, according to cultural anthropologists of course, it's probably hard to pin this down, but that's the way Hyde has presented it. This was the base of the economy of gift-oriented cultures.  

And he was surmising that there's always an element of gift he felt was particularly in the world of creative artists, because if the artist is just thinking about how he or she could make money, their work is not likely to be very good. The artist needs to focus first on the gift dimension to it, the part that comes to them really as a gift. Your talent is a gift, and you may be able to see that your talent as a physician is a gift. And so much of our skill really comes from the gifts that others have given us in a way. 

Just think of our training. We think about how hard we worked and it's true and how many years we gave into our training. But isn't it also true that we learned from the illnesses of others? They shared their stories, they shared their experiences with us even when we didn't know that much and we didn't have that much to offer to them really. We were relatively unskilled. We developed our skills through treating people who presented themselves to us in a way hoping that we would help them, certainly. But their presence to us, since we were not well-trained at that point, was a bit of a gift. That's how I would see it. 

And if you see it as a gift, perhaps it could help us in our orientation toward the service we need to provide to others, those moments when we might feel somewhat resentful. Well, maybe it's a good time to just remind ourselves a bit. Not that I don't feel resentful or exhausted or- I'm just like anyone else, but I can remind myself that yes, it's a gift to be a doctor or a nurse. I believe, I really believe that. In so many fields there's so much just about the finances and the bottom line, and that's not true about being a doctor or a nurse. That's not ultimately what it's about. And it's one of the great pleasures of being a doctor how we can help other people with our skills.

Dr. Lidia Schapira: When we hear the word "gift," unfortunately, our minds may go to things that we need to declare that could potentially be conflicts. But you're talking about gift in a totally different way. You're talking about giving the gift of our presence and recognizing the gifts that our patients give us by teaching us, by allowing us to learn from their experience through their experiences. And in your essay, you talk a little bit about appreciating this and have an impact on the culture of medicine. So, can you talk a little bit more about how this appreciation of gifts exchanged and time spent together and talents shared can impact favorably on the culture of medicine even perhaps, as you're hinting, improve our sense of wellness or reduce our risk of burnout? 

Dr. Alan Astrow: When we think of our work as partly a gift we can give to others and a gift we have received from others, I believe it enhances our morale and the morale of whatever enterprise we are part of. If we all, I believe, are able to appreciate more of the dimension of gift in healthcare, it has the potential to have us see things differently, organize the way we care for patients and each other differently, and potentially transform our whole system of care. Because finally, it starts with one-to-one encounter, I believe. But the one-to-one encounter is influenced by the larger systems that shape what we're able to do. So, I think if we doctors and nurses are able to articulate a gift dimension to care, I think we can help our administrators see it that way. 

Because I think my experience working with many in administration is that they have chosen to work in the field of healthcare because administration wants to see it that way, too. Many of our most talented administrators could be working in other fields - finance, law - they could be making more money in other areas. But they chose to enter healthcare because they do want to provide service to others. And it may be that many in administration, but many of those who are responsible for keeping hospitals financially solvent, are just as concerned as we doctors are by the overweening presence of financial concerns as they more and more dominate our day-to-day lives as physicians, nurses, and others in healthcare.  

I don't want to sound like a Pollyanna here. We do have to be able to pay for things, no question about it, and there's no simple solution to any of these problems, and how should healthcare be paid for? Should we have single payer? These are complicated issues. But I think if we think about it, we should think about how we can organize our system of care so that we can further enhance the dimension of gift. That would be the point.

 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Well, we really appreciate the depth of your reasoning. It certainly is appealing to me, and I hope that it resonates with many of our readers. You've made a very strong pitch here for humanizing and really putting mission front and forward in your incredibly erudite way. 

So, Alan, how does Levinas enter our conversation? And how does Levinas enter the thinking that you had in putting these pieces together for the essay?

Dr. Alan Astrow: So Levinas is one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, and his core insight is that the reason we are here as human beings, in his view, is to bring the ethical order into being. So we're not here to earn the maximum amount of money. We're not here to face our own mortality. No, we have a specific purpose to bring the ethical order into being. And, as doctors and nurses engaged every day in actions that we're trying to help people, he would claim that we should be trying to bring the ethical order into being in healthcare in our day-to-day actions. He was very focused on the idea of face-to-face ethics, that it's in the experience of the other, seeing the face of the other, that you need to respond. We ought to respond to the needs of the other. At that moment, we're not thinking of ourselves at all. We're just responding to the needs of the other. And in that way, we are bringing the ethical order into being. 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: So the dimension of gift giving is layered onto this ethical order. How do we put the two thoughts together?

Dr. Alan Astrow: When you give a gift, ideally, you're trying to think about the other. You're trying to think about what the other needs. The gift is not about you. It's about what's going to make the other happy. It's what's going to make the other feel acknowledged. That's what the nature of a gift is. And you're not really expecting anything back. In medicine, too, it's not about what the patient could do for us, it's only about what we can do for the patient and the patient's needs. So, it's a true gift of the doctor to the patient. And that's why the patient can feel trust in us because they sense that it's a gift of us to them. We are not expecting patients to do anything for us at that moment. We're not expecting them to be paying us, although we hope we'll get paid. We're not expecting them to enroll in a clinical trial, although we might eventually hope that they will. But at that moment, it's pure gift. That's where the trust comes from. The gift comes first, the others later.

 Dr. Lidia Schapira: So one could argue, Alan, that that is just the ethical conduct of medicine, that there is no extra here, that there is no gift, that that is just how we should behave. So help me understand a little bit more then, about how you understand gift. From my experience, as I was taught by cultural anthropologists, gift can be a gift of time, gift can be a gift of presence. And it is those sorts of additional things that we convey through our actions or transmit through our presence. Reciprocally, we also are gifted by our patient's presence and by their gift of spending the time they have left with us. How do you understand gift?

Dr. Alan Astrow: Okay, so you're saying a gift is something extra that we add on. Okay, I can accept that. I wouldn't deny that. My point would be that, yes, a gift orientation is central to the ethical practice of medicine. Yes, it is the ethical practice of medicine. But what we're seeing in our current world is that that orientation is increasingly threatened. Isn't that what we're seeing? That doctors are selling practices to private equity? That we have more and more for-profit businesses in healthcare? And it seems in too many places, patients fear that the primary focus is not on the gift dimension, but the primary focus more and more seems to be on the mercantile aspect, the money aspect. So my point would be that, yes, we ought to know what the ethical practice of medicine is. But it's too easy to forget, isn't it? And don't we see that that's what's happening? People are forgetting. We all need to be reminded - who is going to remind us? 

Dr. Lidia Schapira: Thank you, Alan, for your contribution.  

And to our listeners, thank you for listening to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. Don't forget to give us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all of the ASCO shows at asco.org/podcast. 

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.  

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.