A surgeon reflects on illness, anxiety and the enduring value of compassion in medical care
Every year around Doctors’ Day, I receive calls from editors requesting a column. For most of my professional life, writing such an article required little effort.
The themes were familiar: advances in medical science, professional ethics, emerging technologies, continuing education and the many structural challenges facing our healthcare system.
Over time, I developed a certain comfort with these subjects because they belonged to the world I knew best. This year, however, the words did not come so easily.
As I sat before a blank screen, I found myself questioning whether another article about healthcare would add anything meaningful to a conversation that has been repeated countless times before.
After all, doctors already know the importance of lifelong learning, evidence-based practice and professional responsibility. Patients know the frustrations of overcrowded hospitals and overburdened systems. What remained unsaid?
The answer arrived from an unexpected place.
In recent years, life has gradually shifted my position from being solely a healthcare provider to occasionally becoming a healthcare receiver and, more often, an anxious attendant accompanying loved ones through the labyrinth of modern medicine.
It is a transition that no medical curriculum prepares us for. After spending decades sitting on one side of the consultation table, I suddenly found myself standing on the other.
That experience has been humbling.
I have waited outside clinics for my appointment number to be called. I have stood in queues collecting investigation reports. I have paced hospital corridors carrying the same worries that millions of patients carry every day.
Like countless others, I have sent reports to my treating physicians through WhatsApp, watching the familiar sequence unfold: a message delivered, a message seen, and then silence.
What appears trivial to a busy doctor can feel enormous to a worried patient.
The waiting creates its own narratives. Is the report normal? Has the doctor missed something? Should I send another message? Would that seem impatient? Is the silence reassuring or alarming?
Only those who have inhabited both worlds truly understand that medicine is not experienced in the same way by doctors and patients. For physicians, a laboratory report may be one among dozens reviewed that day. For the patient, it may contain an answer capable of changing the course of an entire life.
That realisation led me to a question I had never seriously considered during my younger years in medicine: What do patients actually want from their doctors?
The answer, I discovered, has remarkably little to do with the things doctors spend much of their careers pursuing.
Patients are rarely impressed by the number of conferences we attend, the journals in which we publish or the distinctions that follow our names. Those achievements matter within the profession, and rightly so, but they are seldom what patients remember.
What patients remember is how we made them feel.
In our part of the world, there is a beautiful Urdu word that captures this truth more completely than any English equivalent ever could: Khulq (خُلق).
Khulq encompasses noble character, gracious conduct, gentle manners, humility, patience, compassion and the ability to communicate with dignity and warmth. When someone says, “Doctor sahib ka bahut achha khulq hai,” they are offering one of the highest compliments a physician can receive. They are not speaking about qualifications or technical expertise. They are speaking about character.
Clinical competence earns confidence. Khulq earns trust.
And trust remains the most valuable currency in medicine.
Listen carefully whenever families discuss doctors among themselves. Their recommendations rarely begin with academic achievements.
Instead, they say: “He listens patiently.” “She explains things clearly.” “He never makes you feel rushed.” “She answers when you genuinely need help.”
These observations may appear simple, yet they reveal something profound about the relationship between doctors and patients. Long after people have forgotten the names of medications, the details of investigations or even the exact diagnosis, they remember whether they felt respected, heard and cared for.
Medicine, despite all its scientific sophistication, remains a deeply human enterprise.
We live in an era of astonishing technological progress. Artificial intelligence assists diagnosis. Robotic systems perform procedures of extraordinary precision. Imaging technologies reveal details of the human body that earlier generations could scarcely imagine.
Yet amid these advances, many patients feel increasingly disconnected from those entrusted with their care.
Technology has transformed medicine for the better. It has improved diagnosis, treatment and outcomes. But technology cannot hold a frightened person’s hand, recognise anxiety hidden behind a smile or offer reassurance to a family awaiting difficult news.
Those responsibilities remain uniquely human.
One of the greatest misconceptions in healthcare is that compassion requires large amounts of time. In reality, some of the most meaningful acts in medicine take only moments. A brief explanation. A returned call. A reassuring message acknowledging that a report has been reviewed and that there is no immediate cause for concern.
To the physician, it may seem insignificant.
To the patient, it can mean a peaceful night’s sleep.
The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I become that healing involves far more than treating disease. Medical schools teach us how to identify pathology. Experience teaches us how to manage illness. Wisdom teaches us how to accompany suffering.
These are not the same thing.
A CT scan may be routine for the doctor reviewing it. For the patient, it may represent a confrontation with mortality. A biopsy report may appear as another file on a desk. For a family, it may contain hopes, fears and unanswered questions about the future.
In such moments, knowledge alone is not enough.
Patients need competence, certainly. They deserve the highest standards of scientific care. But they also need presence. They need communication. They need reassurance that they are being treated not merely as cases, but as human beings navigating one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
Perhaps that is the greatest privilege medicine offers. Society does not simply trust us with bodies. It entrusts us with fears, uncertainties and hopes. It allows strangers to reveal aspects of themselves they may share with no one else.
That trust is sacred.
No machine can inherit it. No algorithm can replicate it. No technology can replace it.
As I reflect this Doctors’ Day, I realise that many of my most important teachers were never found in lecture halls or textbooks. They were patients. Some taught through gratitude, others through courage, and many through suffering borne with remarkable dignity.
More recently, life itself has become a teacher.
Standing on both sides of the consultation table has persuaded me of a truth that seems increasingly important in an age obsessed with efficiency and innovation: patients may forget the prescriptions we write and the investigations we order, but they rarely forget how we made them feel during moments of fear and uncertainty.
That is why the finest doctors are remembered not only for their knowledge, but for their Khulq.
Medicine begins with science, but it reaches its highest purpose through humanity.
On this Doctors’ Day, perhaps the most meaningful gift we can offer our patients is not a promise of newer technology or more sophisticated treatment. It is something far older and far more enduring: our attention, our empathy and our willingness to recognise the person behind the illness.
Because at the heart of every consultation is a simple human hope: to be seen, to be heard and to know that one is not facing illness alone.
