Ärzte mit verdrießlichen Patienten neigten eher dazu, sich von der Betreuung der Patienten zu distanzieren. Ärzte mit gereizten Patienten interpretierten die Schmerzen ihrer Patienten eher als übertrieben, empfanden sie als weniger kooperativ, weniger engagiert in der eigenen Pflege oder bereit, sich an einen Behandlungsplan zu halten.

HBO’s emergency-department drama “The Pitt” has become a smash hit in large part because it shows the deeply human toll that emergency medicine exacts from those who practice it. While researchers have long known that real-life ER doctors are affected by many of the stresses that “The Pitt” has so effectively captured, a recent study led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published in the BMJ: Quality & Safety is the first to design an interactive and controlled experimental method to test how irritable patients—those displaying frustration or anger—affect the emotions of those treating them, and thus, potentially, the effectiveness of care they receive.

The emergency department has always been one of the most stressful places to work in any hospital—one never knows what sorts of injuries, or how many of them, each shift will hold. Additionally, these spaces have increasingly been on the frontlines of various economic and social crises, including the lack of health insurance and skyrocketing medical costs, immigration and law enforcement and increasing needs for mental health and addiction services. One of the results of all of this is that patients are increasingly irritable, and too often take their frustrations out on caregivers.

“Emotions are an inherent part of our lives—they’re what makes us human,” says Linda Isbell, Feldman-Vorwerk Family Professor in Social Psychology at UMass Amherst and the paper’s lead author. “But for too long, the medical culture has expected doctors to leave their emotions at the door. This is just unrealistic.”

https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/early/2026/07/09/bmjqs-2025-019061

AI physician bots will solve this problem. A bot in a ML system that monitors our physiological symptoms in daily life, asks questions about symptoms, listens no matter how often or how long a patient complains, analyzes vocal changes to include in diagnostics, and orders medical tests before we ever get to a human doctor’s office will help to prevent doctors‘ emotional responses and preconceived notions.
An AI doesn’t get irritated when the patient gets irritated or take it personally when the patient’s pain makes her angry or unkind. A doctor-bot just carries on with more diagnostics and testing.
A doctor-bot doesn’t get burned out. A doctor-bot just finishes the task and then evaluates the symptoms & tests for the next thousand patients.

When qualified doctors are just overseeing the work that robots and human physician assistants do, our healthcare systems will be better for patients and more affordable overall.

And the progress being made in pain research now that more people have entered the field and more ML and AI tools are available to speed up research will also make a very big difference over the next decade.

It is really good that 25-33% of today’s medical students plan careers that are not medical practices.

Judgmental physicians

Sometimes I wonder why certain people become doctors at al. I understand human bias is just a thing. But if you’re gonna be a doctor, I feel like you need to actively unpack those biases and work to provide neutral care.

Don’t they realize that pain CAUSES peevishness?