Functional brain imaging compares physicians and matched controls and finds that the ’empathy circuitry’ of the brain is activated much less in the former when watching a video of an acupuncture procedure. The researchers take this as an indication that physicians’ training and experience has trained them to keep detachment. This is certainly true, and I have at times considered it the devil’s bargain into which I have entered to be a healer. However, I am not sure the study demonstrates this well-knwon phenomenon, as the researchers assert. First of all, I don’t think it is inflicting pain per se that leads physicians to a detached perspective. It is, more generally, being in the presence of so much pain and suffering. Secondly, the difference between physicians’ and nonphysicians’ experiences in watching an acupuncture video probably has less to do with tolerating inflicting pain and more to do with the fact that physicians know acupuncture not to be painful in the first place, unlike the lay observers.