When the life of a loved one is hanging in the balance in a hospital, all you need is someone who talks to you, to describe the situation, to give you an honest and compassionate feedback; a hope if possible, a preparation for the next phase when everything is left to the mercy of Allah. In a hospital setup, that “someone” should be a doctor. The man or the woman marveling in the white coat, hurrying from a room to another, saving lives and soothing pains.
When that idealized hero decides to act in an arrogant, degrading and dismissive manner, then, there must be something wrong.
I had unfortunately witnessed such a case in one of the biggest hospitals in the city recently. A doctor was almost ready to start a fight with a patient’s family because they asked him to read a medical report about their father whose body was lying in the ICU. He did not want to read the report although he was the doctor in charge for the night, the family should wait for the doctor who ordered the report till the weekend is over … the patient did not make through the weekend though!
I find myself inclined to believe with a lot others that there is a problem in the admission criteria when it comes to those who want to study medicine. It is not a profession that is suitable to everyone. It is not the books, the data, the technicalities, the formulas, and the tons of Latin terminologies doctors all over the world are asked to understand and memorize in order to graduate and practice medicine. There must be something beyond all these technicalities for someone to be able to call the shots and make life/death decisions in mere seconds sometimes. On the admission page of Harvard Medical School, the school admits that the admission criteria have not changed much recently. “The requirements for medical school have remained basically unchanged for many decades, despite the obvious change in medical knowledge (e.g., about disease mechanisms and our understanding of drug actions),” they wrote. However, there are some new requirements that they think are needed “the pace of new discovery, and the permeation of biochemistry, cell biology, and genetics into most areas of medicine. Therefore, adequacy of preparation in the preclinical sciences requires acquisition of more information than in the past. At present, pathophysiology and pharmacology require detailed knowledge of molecular targets and biochemical mechanisms, and modern cell biology has become the language of medical disciplines such as pathology, oncology, cardiology, and neurology.”
Needless to say, all the admission criteria specified by Harvard and almost all medical schools around the globe are technical in nature, they lack any insights on the applicant’s psychological abilities and ethical standards. I have always thought that to be a doctor, you need to be highly sensitive to the pain of others, to reach out to them, to understand them, to shine confidence and hope. “If you're looking for a good physician, start by looking for a human being who cares about people.” George LeMaitre, a surgeon and the author of “How to Choose a Good Doctor” once wrote.
In a survey conducted by a medical practitioner on social media, he asked his audience one single question “what makes a good doctor?” Out of the answers he received, the technical abilities came at the fifth position, leaving the first four to: Being empathetic, good listener, compassionate/caring, and humble, respectively.
This is not meant to devalue the technical competency of medical practitioners. On the contrary, to be a doctor, it is automatically assumed that you are in possession of an above average intelligence, knowledge and ability to judge. In other words, a good doctor already have got the knowledge, he or she only needs the other face of the coin, the soft side of it.
I have never been able to fathom doctors who are dismissive or rude. The practitioners of this holy profession lose all their nobility when they think that what they are doing is more of a favor rather than of service, when everything become about money, profits, and targets rather than the well-being of another human being.
