Called to Care Spotlight: What if We Got the Prescription Backwards?

What if healthcare's prescription for clinician burnout has been partly backwards?

For years, clinicians have been warned about compassion fatigue and encouraged to create emotional distance from their patients.

Larry Benz says newer research complicates that story.

In this special conversation, longtime friend and collaborator Tim Flynn joins Larry to explore the ideas behind the newly updated edition of Called to Care.

Their conversation begins with more than four decades of shared history, from the military and the early days of Evidence In Motion, before moving into some of the biggest changes Larry made to the book.

They discuss the distinction between burnout and moral injury, why Larry says “you can't yoga your way out of” a broken system, and research suggesting that the right kind of empathy may actually protect clinicians instead of exhausting them.

Larry describes that approach as exquisite empathy:

Highly present. Deeply attuned. Well-boundaried.

They also revisit Larry and Tim's work around placebo and nocebo, why language can change the patient's experience of care, the growing impact of payer pressure on clinical conversations, and why Larry believes healthcare has increasingly outsourced one of its most important interventions: the conversation itself.

Along the way, Larry offers perhaps the simplest expression of the entire episode:

The new edition of Called to Care asks what it means to preserve that connection in a healthcare environment increasingly shaped by burnout, technology, AI, payer pressure and transactional care.

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