How Emotions Are Like Asbestos

Our plain-English summary of How Emotions Are Like Asbestos, by A. Shah (Academic Medicine, 2017).

The study

• Author: A. Shah
• Journal: Academic Medicine
• Published: 2017;92(11):1594
• Cited by: 1 article, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This is not a research study and reports no data about asbestos. It is a short personal essay by a fourth-year medical student, published in the journal's Teaching and Learning Moments section. The author used asbestos only as a figure of speech. The essay pictured a person who works in a naval shipyard for years without feeling harmed and is later told of mesothelioma, as a comparison for the fear that constant exposure to patients' pain might harden a psychiatrist's heart. Its mention of mesothelioma and of lungs hardened by calcified plaque is a lay, hypothetical picture within that comparison, not a clinical account or evidence about asbestos disease. The essay then described two 16-year-old patients who became violent on a hospital floor. The author felt anger and fear toward one and sadness toward the other, who had a history of foster care and abuse. The author concluded that exploring one's feelings, rather than hiding them, helped in understanding and supporting patients. The essay contains no study, measurements or findings about asbestos exposure or asbestos-related disease.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: personal reflective essay (Teaching and Learning Moments section); not a research study
• Who was studied: The author, a fourth-year medical student at Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, reflecting on two 16-year-old hospital patients; no study population
• Exposure: No asbestos exposure was studied. Asbestos and shipyard work appear only as a metaphor for emotional exposure in medicine.
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that it is valuable to explore one's feelings instead of hiding them, as a way to connect with and support patients.

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