Doctors could benefit from support to help them cope with the trauma of patient death, says a psychologist speaking at the Death, Dying & Disposal conference organized by the University of Bath in the UK.

In a preliminary study, Dr Elaine Kasket from London Metropolitan University carried out detailed interviews with eight US physicians about their experiences of death. Half of those she spoke to wept as they recounted stories of traumatic death they had experienced as physicians, even though some of these events had occurred as much as 30 years ago.

“There is an unwritten rule for doctors that suggests it is not wise or possible for them to feel emotions over a patient’s death because there is always another patient to help,” said Dr Kasket.

“Whilst this detachment might help when presented with a patient with a severe injury, I question how well it serves them in the longer term.

“This emotional detachment is socially ingrained through medical school, and the cultures in both the UK and US medical establishments would see a physician’s emotional response to death as a sign of weakness and even incompetence.

“It feeds into this popular image of the physician as some kind of superhuman ultimate rescuer of human life; unable to do his or her job if they give in to or even acknowledge their emotions.

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Throughout your life you’ve been conditioned and conditioned yourself to believe in certain cause and effect relationships. Some of your cause-effect relationships may be faulty, however, because you formed in your mind some of those cause-effect relationships at times when you were too young, too ignorant, too traumatized, and/or too inexperienced to adequately evaluate the evidence at hand.

With practice, you’ve perfected your cause and effect relationships to such an extent that they have become automatic – so much so that you simply accept them as truth without question. Further, you tend to apply the “rules” of those relationships to later similar events. For example, the rule that “men cannot be trusted” because (cause-effect) one molested me as a child – taints all future encounters – setting up romantic interludes for failure before they even start. And there’s the first rub – your faulty cause-effect relationships have become so automatic you no longer question them – in fact, you may indeed be completely unaware of many of them.

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Military combat often causes extreme stress, leaving many diagnosed with the psychiatric condition of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. PTSD is associated with several brain structure and function abnormalities. “Although it is tempting to conclude that these abnormalities were caused by the traumatic event, it is also possible that they were pre-existing risk factors that increased the risk of developing PTSD upon the traumatic event’s occurrence,” explains researcher Roger Pitman. Drs. Kasai and Yamasue and their colleagues at the Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo in Tokyo, Japan, sought to examine this association in a new study published in the March 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry.

The authors measured the gray matter density of the brains of combat-exposed Vietnam veterans, some with and some without PTSD, and their combat-unexposed identical twins using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The MRI images allowed the investigators to compare specific brain regions of the siblings. They found that the gray matter density of the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain involved in emotional functioning, was reduced in veterans with PTSD, but not in their twins who had not experienced combat. According to Dr. Pitman, “this finding supports the conclusion that the psychological stress resulting from the traumatic stressor may damage this brain region, with deleterious emotional consequences.”

The good news is that many other studies have demonstrated that our brains are plastic and have the ability to regenerate. The problem is that brain regeneration is not always a straight gain for loss thing. Diet, exercise, behavioral habits, attitude, and specific regenerative exercises all can play a substantial role in how or if certain brain structures recover from stressor damage. Learning how to de-stress and more easily roll with life’s stresses can speed the process of recovery. I recommend self-hypnosis, Rapid Eye Technology’s Skills for Life, and meditation as effective self-healing methods.

You can make those life changes you want to make in the blink of an eye.

New research out of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, shows that brain neurons can change in as little as two minutes even in adults. For years scientists have known about the plasticity of the brain – that it can change neuronal connections and even grow new brain cells. But until recently, no one had studied the speed at which these changes can occur.

It is unlikely that a brain cell would grow to maturity and make all those dendrite connections in just two minutes. Some other mechanism must be at work.
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Bruce McNaughton, a professor of psychology and physiology, and his colleague David Euston have shown that, during sleep, the reactivated memories of real-time experiences are processed within the brain at a higher rate of speed. That rate can be as much as six or seven times faster, and what McNaughton calls "thought speed."

If you've had a similar experience, an imagery or concept can be transferred nearly instantly – 6-7 times faster than real-time. This means you can read a book at super speed (called speed reading). You can also do Rapid Eye Technology, which uses a rapid visual and auditory script and process.

Memory stores patterns of activity in modular form in the brain's cortex. Different modules in the cortex process different kinds of information — sounds, sights, tastes, smells, etc. The cortex sends these networks of activity to a region called the hippocampus. The hippocampus then creates and assigns a tag, a kind of temporary bar code, that is unique to every memory and sends that signal back to the cortex. Each module in the cortex uses the tag to retrieve its own part of the activity.

The brain uses this biological trick because there is no way for all of its neurons to connect with and interact with every other neuron. It is still an expensive task for the hippocampus to make all of those connections. The retrieval tags the hippocampus generates are only temporary until the cortex can carry a given memory on its own.

The temporary nature of this tagging system means you can quickly change your mind repeatedly, reinterpret memories, and supercharge learning. Can you read at 25000 words per minute? Yes you can! And your brain will help you do it.

Source: David R. Euston
University of Arizona