Yet Another Ignorant Doctor's Comment

[CoastWatcher]

Every so often we've posted comments/observations that reflect the ignorance of far too many doctors. Here's one my doctor relayed to me from a new patient. This fellow had been in treatment with another physician for nearly seven months. A poorly designed protocol and failure to monitor results had left him feeling miserable.

When he complained that, if anything, his libido was even more diminished at the seventh month of therapy, this doctor told him, "At your age, don't even worry about libido. You should be focused on other things, it's not worth the stress."

When you you think you can't hear anything worse...

 

[Jinzang]

Sad to say, but too often doctors are lacking in empathy for their patients' problems. In part I believe it's the competitive selection process to go to medical school, in part the medical school education, but listening and caring are valuable tools that are too often neglected.

I once heard a talk by a Tibetan monk who practiced traditional Tibetan medicine. He said, "A doctor needs to remember that the patient who is seeking your help is a desperate person and needs to be treated with sympathy and compassion."

 

[davidrn]

I worked at a teaching hospital for many years as both a senior RN and as management. I learned from meeting many MDs the true flaw in the whole process of educating an MD. A smart student in high school decides to go into medicine, but they realize they must be the #1 student in their HS, and then they also must be top 10 students in College. What this does is limit their ability to work at part time jobs, and more importantly, work in a job where they interact with regular folks. They also have limits to their social life, getting A's is more important than meeting a potential spouse (or just having a fling). I noticed the MDs that I hung out with were into non medical things that we had in common. There was a mechanical engineer I knew who saved up enough salary to go to Med school and to carry him thru his residency. By coincidence, I met him in the parking garage one day, and we both had classic (daily driver) cars, I had a 1964 Mercury Comet, he had about the same year Chevy. Except when there was a (cardiac) code, we never talked about medicine, we talked about everything regular guys talk about, sports, cars, woman.
There are a few more cases like this, it made me recognize, MDs need to have a break in their education to work in a job where they must get along with customers. If this was built into the MD education, we would have better MDs.
I always tell friends about walking the hall once with the hospital president, I was impressed that he knew the names of every janitor working in the building. He nodded to MDs and Nurses, but asked a janitor about one of his kids , who had just gotten into college. That impressed me, he understood how to talk with regular folks.