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Health Check: What Doctors Feel

Doctor helping patient

31/07/2013

What Doctors Feel

BBC World Service - Health Check, What Doctors Feel

How do emotions affect physicians and the way they treat patients?

Why doctors' emotions are important in treating patients. And, how has the world of fertility treatment changed? Plus, does food tastes different depending on what cutlery you use?

When you go to the doctor you are probably more worried about how you are feeling than how they are, but a new book called What Doctors Feel reveals that your doctors’ emotions can have more of an impact than you might think. Dr Danielle Ofri, associate professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine, is the author and has been caring for patients for more than 20 years at New York’s Bellevue Hospital.

Advances in Reproductive Technology
It is 35 years since the world’s first test tube baby was born in the UK. Since that breakthrough, fertility treatments have been used to help millions of people around the world have children. As well as helping women to improve their chances of conceiving by overcoming infertility, some clinics are offering women a chance to control their fertility - by harvesting their eggs to use later, when the time is right for them. The BBC’s Jon Stewart reports on how things have changed, from a lab in California which offers some of the latest IVF treatments.

Fertility treatment is famously very expensive, but a few weeks ago, results of a new, much cheaper form of IVF were presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction & Embryology Conference in London. Presenter Claudia Hammond discusses this new technique, developed by the Genk Institute for Fertility Technology in Belgium, with studio guest Dr Graham Easton.

Flavour Perception
Experimental psychologist Professor Charles Spence and his team at the University of Oxford have been experimenting with different kinds of cutlery and how it can change the way we think our food tastes. Their research suggests that size, weight, shape and colour all have an effect on flavour.

(Picture: Doctor helping patient in Germany. Credit: Getty Images)

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