Atlantic City Weekly

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In a half-century of medical teaching, Atlantic City-area doctor Victor Bressler
also has become known; and beloved; for showing caregivers of all ages and stations
the potential power of the arts and humanities in the medical context. He helps doctors
and patients alike see how activities such as writing might help move them into
relationships where qualities like empathy and acceptance trump the anger, fears and depression so often associated with illness and dying. He was born in Atlantic city more than 80 years ago, at the very hospital (now AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center) where he has served as an innovator, teacher, doctor and caregiver for nearly that amount of time.

You’re a pioneer in medical humanities.

After I dispensed my internal medicine practice in 2002, I focused on teaching medical
humanities, that is art as it relates to healthcare. This sometimes is taken for
granted, though in the past decade it has appeared more and more in medical school
curricula and peer review literature.

How did your interest develop?

A holistic approach always seemed very important to me, but this is a continuing process. In the service, due to a doctor shortage I had an opportunity to enter the fields of psychiatry and neurology. This opened my eyes to many things I’d thought about, but at a more pragmatic level. Then again, the longer physicians are in practice,
 the more experiences we accumulate about ourselves in relation to patients and patients’ families. Eventually we may write about these things and these become documents of enlightenment; they feed our awareness, and the acuity of that awareness of the
universal aspects of what might otherwise have seemed isolated workplace events.

How do you define caregiver?

We are all caregivers, whether we are professionals or not. We take care of ourselves 24/7 and therefore we’re on common ground, with the same feelings, fears and,
eventually, insights into how it feels to be concerned about life as it intersects with the discomforts of illness and dying. 


And how might writing become relevant to the process?

We are all on a common pathway, but there is no single template for action. We talk about journaling, about narrative medicine, about poetry and medicine, yet only a small fraction of young physicians will move in that direction. The rest is discovered over time. I tried journaling in my early years and it was a disaster because I was much too
self-conscious. But now, I write at random about the events of my day and encounters with colleagues, family, friends and patients. Setting these out on paper provides an
opportunity to reflect upon and rethink the events.

You’ve cautioned about technology’s limits.

Our technologies have become highly complex and competitive, and when they are being
touted, the person, whether doctor or patient, may become obscured. We should of course prepare as best possible, but we must be mindful that the patient still is in the
center. 


Empathy, and listening, play major parts in your teaching.

Ultimately you best know what’s going on when you yourself have been there. And we must be prepared to listen, even when it isn’t real. A patient of mine — a fine, fine
physician — had patients visiting him on his deathbed. As he slipped further away from this life, his wife asked, ‘How can you give these people so much time? They just want
 you to listen to them and they’re not understanding what’s happening with you.’ He laughed and said, ‘Who’s listening?’ All those people had a relationship with that doctor. They loved him, and he understood that they loved him. He didn’t have to hear what they were saying; he knew what they were feeling. And these are some of the intricacies, the beautiful themes that insinuate themselves in the practice of caring. 


Your annual conferences help caregivers consider these concepts.

This is our 19th year on the concept of ‘Bringing Caregivers Closer.’ [This year’s all-day conference is Dec. 11 at Stockton College.] AtlanticCare has evolved a philosophy that looks to the larger community, so we bring our interns and our
residents-in-training, but we also extend it to the community. We bring in poets, writers, cancer survivors. The mix makes a difference. You can teach the humanities, but mostly they have to be learned through living. It becomes about what happens psychologically, and spiritually, between caregiver and patient.