By Evan Falchuk

You can’t generalize about the medical profession from talking to just one doctor.  But there are striking similarities in the ways the world’s best doctors think about medical care.  I had the honor to meet such a doctor yesterday, Dr. Takeshi Kawase.  He’s Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the School of Medicine at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan.

Dr. Kawase is a neurosurgeon, who specializes in skull-base surgeries.  Interestingly one of his major specialties is operating on patients with the exact same illness my brother dealt with recently.

I learned a lot from my talk with Dr. Kawase.  What else would you expect from a talk with a renowned medical professor?

Dr. Kawase has been a leader in forging collaboration among ENT, plastic surgery and neurosurgery for his patients.  He’s also a leading medical educator in Japan, and an active participant in international medical education.

I asked him to tell me about his view of the culture of medicine in Japan.  He says that doctors of the older generation often work very long hours for no additional pay.  He suspects the fee for service approach to medicine in the United States may be one reason health care is more costly there than in Japan.

But, he says, there are signs that this is changing.  The younger generation of Japanese doctors are demanding of a better lifestyle and better pay.  He fears that as the population ages in Japan, and there are relatively fewer doctors, this may lead to increases in health care costs.  He worries about what will happen to the culture of medicine.

Meanwhile he teaches aspiring young doctors and tries to instill in them his core values.

He has embossed on his letterhead three words which define how he teaches his students and what he wants to instill in them.  The words are:

Technique, Science, Heart.

I asked Dr. Kawase to tell me what those words mean to him.

He told me that technique, the mechanical process of surgery, is important because you can’t do the job effectively without it.  But it’s only one part of what is really important.

Science, he says may be most important.  To him, science means knowing what it is really wrong with the patient.  It means thinking about what the patients symptoms might mean, not just rushing to operate on him based on potentially faulty assumptions.

Heart, he says, is the recognition that patients are not material objects.  They are people, with lives and families and fears.  They need, and deserve, not just the best science and technique.  They deserve empathy, support, understanding, listening.

You wouldn’t expect to hear a neurosurgeon talk about heart, but he means it.  You can sense it in his presence.  And you can see it in his face.

It was a privilege to meet Dr. Kawase.