Medical students should watch films that inspire compassion

doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7484.166-c

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Roger Dobson

Abergavenny

Watching films that inspire compassion may make medical students more sympathetic to patients, more altruistic, and more understanding, a report in Families, Systems, and Health has claimed (2004;22;445-52). This “Don Quixote effect”—in which imagination overcomes reality—could be introduced into the medical curriculum to help medical students develop more compassion, kindness, and caring, by showing medical films such as Philadelphia, Wit, Terms of Endearment, and Leaving Las Vegas.

Johanna Shapiro and Lloyd Rucker claim that doctors experience different …