Hospitals are scary places!
Have you ever been to a place where a sign said, “Authorized persons only”?
When you are a medical specialist, you surely have!
But think about an area, where you have never been allowed in!
Have you ever wondered what kind of world lies behind that restricted access?
What lies behind the restricted access?
When I was about 12 years old, I played a role on stage of our city’s theatre. Initially, it was thrilling to enter the stage entrance and to see the hidden world behind the curtain. A whole new perspective was unfolding there. After a while, this approach became routine, and the thrill was gone.
Every day, I enter any hospital with a sense of routine. I “understand” the place, and the operation theatre or recovery are natural habitats for me.
The patient sees something different
Of course, the experience is entirely different for patients, regardless of whether they are adults or children.
Hospitals are scary places!
Whereas adults might have some experience and acceptance for the environment, to any child the sheer amount of new impressions are close to overwhelming. All senses are intensely stimulated with directions and (warning)signs, sounds of cleaning machines or beeper sounds and let alone the smells of disinfectant. Together with the anticipation of something unusual happening, anybody would be on high alert.
What was the first step of torture?
The first step of torture in medieval time was:
to drag the victim into an unfamiliar room,
to take away their liberty to go whenever they wanted
and to just show them the instruments meant for inflicting pain.
What has a hospital in common with approaching torture?
It is very likely that entering the hospital might have the same level of anticipated horror:
The child is:
dragged into an unfamiliar room,
their liberty to go whenever they wanted is taken away
and there are instruments on display that appear to be meant for inflicting pain.
Given that also all non-verbal signs of the parent will communicate at least “tension”, fear in the child is aggravated.
Hospitals are scary places!
Why do children respond like this?
Neuroscience allows us to understand that for some basic form of torture, we don’t even need to touch the victim.
We only need two things: the expectation of pain and the sight of instruments, that might cause the pain. The rest of the torture will be done by our brain. The brain will produce various negative ideas about how painful the coming event will be. This “imagined” pain triggers responses in the same area of the brain as “real” pain would.
The images do “cause” the experience in the brain by themselves.
In essence, the moment when a child enters a hospital, the mental “torture” begins. This sensation intensifies, when the child is dragged into an examination room.
Cooperation in a torture chamber?
As mentioned before, this setting is not different from entering a torture chamber: no freedom to leave when they want to, no say over the next steps and frequently some unfamiliar instruments on display. And in the middle of all of this there are we doctors, as strangers, and we want the child to trust us and to cooperate …
When we set things up like this, we are doomed to fail.
But I want to illustrate a way out of this mess in one of the upcoming posts!
In a nutshell:
Hospitals are scary places!
Nobody makes friends in a dungeon.
Nobody likes surprises in a dungeon.
Communication lives on comments … fancy to share yours?