I take your point, but there is also a movement among medical schools to create better and more caring physician/patient interactions. Many schools use role-playing for such things as taking patient histories or discussing preventive health measures (smoking cessation, weight control, etc.). They are also emphasizing things like cultural awareness and cross-gender or cross-cultural communications, and awareness of communication dynamics in the clinical setting (such things as doctors insisting on professional titles while calling patients by their first names; whether the doctor sits or stands to speak to a patient who is seated or in bed; etc.). The goal is to produce patient encounters that are more comfortable and respectful from the patient’s point of view – which both a moral issue and also contributes significantly to health outcomes.

I think these programs do have tangible benefits. I’m sure many medical students learn to simply “play the game” – but even to do that they have to understand what they’re doing wrong and why. And the sincere and caring ones can be more effective if they understand how they’re coming across.

There is an ancient debate – going back at least to Plato – over whether “virtue” can be taught, or is inborn. But, that aside, if you think of “compassion” as something that is manifested in outward behavior, much like “clinical judgment” or “discipline”, then compassionate behavior and compassionate treatment of others can certainly be taught whether or not the person inwardly endorses that behavior with their personal feelings. And that goal is both achievable and (almost) good enough.

By the time a student reaches medical school, compassion is both impossible to teach (that happens MUCH earlier in life, or never) and quite difficult to judge. The best that med schools can hope to do is to teach medicine and weed out the least compassionate, but the antisocial students (fortunately a minority) easily master the compassionate act, at least while they are being observed.

But it did take me a while to find a doctor who wasn’t focused on my weight and would listen to my issues without getting into that unless I brought it up.