The Human Touch: What a Young Patient Taught Me About Medicine’s True Purpose

“The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.” — Sir William Osler

The UV lamp was humming, the riboflavin drops had been applied, and my young patient was lying still beneath the cross-linking apparatus. The procedure was underway, and I asked what he was doing now.

He was in his early twenties, referred to our centre with a diagnosis of keratoconus. The condition had cost him something most young men never have to consider losing: the visual acuity required to qualify as a pilot. It had been his dream to fly, to soar high up, but keratoconus had quietly, irrevocably closed that door.

As I monitored the procedure, he shared this with me not in anguish, but with a kind of quiet resignation. There was grief in his words, certainly, but also something else—a steadiness I had not expected. I found myself setting aside the clinical detachment that training instils in us, and I asked him simply: So, now what?

His answer stopped me.

He told me he had found his way to a prominent science institute in the country, where he was pursuing astrophysics. And as he said it, something shifted in his voice, the resignation lifted. He was not merely coping with an alternative; he was genuinely absorbed in it. The universe, it turned out, had offered him a different kind of sky to explore, and he had chosen to look up again.

I have thought about that moment many times since. Not because of what I did, but because of what he did, and what it revealed to me about the nature of our work as surgeons.

We are trained meticulously to master the technique. We study corneal biomechanics, perfect our centration, optimise our protocols. In an era of digital operating theatres and AI-driven diagnostics, the tools available to us are extraordinary. Yet, as I stood in that room monitoring wavelengths and energy levels, the most important thing happening was a conversation. A young man was being heard. In being heard, he articulated, perhaps for the first time, that he had not merely survived the loss of his dream, but had grown beyond it.

No algorithm prompted me to ask that question. No AI model flagged that this patient needed more than a technically sound procedure. It was the instinct that comes from being human with another human being, from recognising that the person beneath the UV lamp was not a cornea to be treated, but a young man carrying a story that deserved acknowledgement.

Medical science is, by its nature, imperfect. Outcomes depend not only on surgical skill but on immune status, genetic constitution, and the extraordinary complexity of the human body. We cannot control all of it. What we can control, what no machine can replicate, is the quality of presence we bring to each encounter. The trust a patient places in a surgeon is not merely clinical; it is profoundly human. And that trust, carefully tended, itself becomes a kind of medicine.

The older tradition of family physicians in India understood this intuitively. The therapeutic value of being truly seen by one’s doctor is not sentiment, but science. Since Ader and Cohen’s landmark demonstration in 1975 that psychological states can directly modulate immune function, the field of psychoneuroimmunology has established that the quality of human relationships in clinical care can influence immune response, pain perception, and recovery. This is the placebo effect in its truest form! Not deception, but the measurable healing power of human trust.

I carry that young man’s story with me. When I sit with a patient who has received difficult news. An outcome that fell short of expectations, a diagnosis that changes their plans. I think of how a single question, asked with genuine curiosity, allowed him to discover something about himself. And I bring that into the room with the next patient, and the one after that. His story, shared in a quiet moment during a routine procedure, has shaped the surgeon I am becoming.

This is what artificial intelligence cannot do. It cannot carry one patient’s courage into another patient’s consultation. It cannot be moved by a story, or let that movement change the texture of its next encounter. The ripple of human connection, one patient’s resilience becoming another patient’s comfort, is uniquely ours to create and to pass on.

The digital operating theatre will continue to evolve. AI will sharpen our diagnostics, robotics will refine our precision. I welcome these tools. But I hope we never mistake efficiency for the whole of medicine. The young man who wanted to fly, and found instead the wonder of physics, did not need a more accurate algorithm. He needed someone to ask how he was and to listen, truly listen, to his answer.

That is the human touch. And it remains, above all else, irreplaceable.

Dr Narasimha Murthy is a finalist in the 2026 John Henahan Essay Writing Prize.

Applicants were asked to respond to the following prompt, without using any AI tools:

The digital OR, AI algorithms, and robotics notwithstanding, cataract and refractive surgery involve a human relationship between you and your patient. Please describe how an experience or experiences in your early training reminded you of the importance of the human touch and how this has inspired you in your clinical practice.