The Importance of Cultural Understanding

In this episode of The Big Q, Gaurava Agarwal, MD; Manuel Astruc, MD; and Richard M. Berlin, MD, discuss the importance of understanding a patient's ethnicity and cultural norms when working with them to develop a treatment plan.

Dr Agarwal serves as director of physician well-being for Northwestern Medicine and as an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences (general psychiatry) and medical education in Northwestern Medicine’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Dr Astruc is a psychiatrist with more than 20 years of experience based in New York. He is also the founder of Your Next Act, a coaching program in which he gives people the tools they need to transform stress into success. Dr Berlin is an instructor in psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has also been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 24 years in Psychiatric Times™ in a column called “Poetry of the Times.”