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Saturday, January 03, 2004The man is a doctor. This is the least-examined chapter of his career. But suddenly it all makes sense: Where else but in medicine do you find men and women who never admit a mistake? Who talk more than they listen, and feel entitled to withhold crucial information? Whose lack of tact in matters of life and death might disqualify them for any other field? As much as I hate to admit it, there's a lot of truth in this essay. Anyone who has worked even peripherally in the medical field knows doctors who fit the profile. Although some would argue that beneath the arrogance and haughtiness lies a fear of being wrong or out of control, the closer truth is that during our medical educations we're exposed to an inordinate amount of arrogance and haughtiness in our role models. Someone once described medical education as being akin to living the life of an abused child. And that's not too far from the truth. When we're medical students and residents, we get lambasted and yelled at for the simplest of mistakes or errors or lack of knowledge. We're ridiculed in front of our peers and our superiors at morning presentations, after sleepless nights spent doing work no one else wanted to do. Sometimes we're ridiculed in front of patients during morning rounds. At least, that's the way it was twenty years ago, and it's a good bet that's the way it was thirty years ago when Dr. Dean went through his training. The result is, that we grow up professionally incapable of admitting when we're wrong, and we grow up thinking that the correct response to other's faults is the same scorn and contempt we got as students - even when those faults live more in our own perceptions than in reality. It certainly isn't any way to manage people effectively, let alone lead them. Admittedly, not all physicians turn out this way, just as not all children from abused homes grow up to be hopelessly messed up. But a goodly proportion of us do. UPDATE: The excellent Galen's Log, by a practicing internist, has another take on this. While RangelMD thinks I'm harming our profession by admitting that we have more than our fair share of pompous jerks. (To be fair, we probably have the same share of pompous jerks as academia.) Note to Rangel: Self-examination is a good thing. Without it, there can never be any self-improvement. UPDATE II: And Grunt Doc has some things to say, too. posted by Sydney on 1/03/2004 07:33:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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