Disclaimer: Some details have been altered or generalized to protect patient privacy and maintain HIPAA compliance.

I met him on my inpatient rotation. An elderly veteran with hands that looked like they'd spent decades working. His wife called him her "stubborn old mule," though you could tell she meant it with love. He had come in for what seemed like a straightforward nosebleed, but it didn't stay straightforward for long.

The bleeding wouldn't stop. Lab results showed thrombocytopenia, dangerously low platelets, likely immune thrombocytopenia. His body was attacking itself. We transfused platelets, watched the numbers barely move, transfused again. His baseline dementia, which had already been quietly stealing his memories, got worse under the stress of being in the hospital. Delirium set in, and suddenly everything was strange and frightening for him.

Samuel Edusa, MD. "An AI Generated Sketch Of A Woman Holding The Hand Of Her Husband" 2025, Digital artwork generated using the Flux Kontext Pro model. Personal collection.

His wife never left his side. She was small, only a few years younger than him, dealing with her own health problems. But she stayed, holding his hand through the confusion, whispering to him when he no longer knew where he was.

The decision to transition to comfort care didn't come easily. We discussed it in pre-rounds with the usual clinical precision. But at some point, this stopped being about medicine. It was about a family saying goodbye.

That's when I realized how much those extra few minutes matter.

I could have rushed through the conversation with his wife, delivered the medical facts, and moved on to the next patient. The EHR was waiting, progress notes needed updating, and the productivity clock was ticking. But something made me pause, pull up a chair, and sit with her.

We talked about her husband. Not the patient in room 2301, but the man who had worked until the very end, who had lived what she called "a full life." She told me how he still tried to fix things around the house even when his hands shook. How his stubborn insistence on independence frustrated and endeared her at the same time.

"He wouldn't want this," she said quietly, watching him struggle against the confusion. "He always said he wanted to go with dignity."

I understood something in that moment that no textbook had taught me. Empathy isn't optional in medicine. It's medicine.

I've been thinking about this especially since a JAMA Internal Medicine study found that ChatGPT responses were rated higher in both quality and empathy than physician responses, with empathetic ratings 9.8 times higher for AI than for doctors [1]. The AI responses were longer, more detailed, and perceived as more caring.

That stings, but it makes sense. We're operating under constant time pressure. Packed schedules, overflowing inboxes, administrative burden. ChatGPT doesn't have any of that. It can take as long as it wants to craft a thoughtful response [1]. We sometimes get three minutes.

But here's what keeps me grounded: AI can't sit in a hospital chair at 2 AM holding the hand of a frightened spouse. It can't read the grief in a daughter's eyes or know when touch matters more than words. It doesn't carry its own understanding of loss and mortality into those moments.

That evening, as I finished my documentation, I stopped by his room one more time. His wife was still there, reading to him from a book of poems. He had grown peaceful in the dim light. The agitation from earlier in the day had settled.

"Thank you," she said. Not for anything medical we had done, but for seeing them as people.

He passed quietly the next morning, surrounded by family. The nurses told me his wife held his hand until the very end.

I've been turning this over in my head since. What does it mean to "practice" medicine? We practice the science, obviously: diagnosis, treatment protocols, evidence-based interventions. But we also practice being human in the face of suffering. We practice showing up when cures aren't possible.

AI might write more empathetic-sounding text. But empathy in medicine is more than words on a screen. It's being willing to sit with someone's fear and pain when you could easily walk to the next room.

His wife sent a card to our unit a few weeks later. "Thank you for taking care of my husband," she wrote, "but more than that, thank you for taking care of us."

Those words have stayed with me. In a system that tracks RVUs and door-to-discharge times, it's easy to forget that what patients remember most is whether you were actually present with them.

The extra few minutes matter. Sitting down instead of standing. Asking the question you don't technically need to ask. Listening to the answer even when it doesn't change the treatment plan. That's the part of doctoring that no algorithm can replicate. And I think it's the part our patients need most.

---

Reference

[1] Ayers JW, Poliak A, Dredze M, et al. Comparing Physician and Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Responses to Patient Questions Posted to a Public Social Media Forum. JAMA Intern Med. 2023;183(6):589-596. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.1838.