My previous article highlighted the need for revisiting the criterion for selection of students at medical schools. It is not enough for a doctor to be evaluated solely on his or her technical competency, that is already a given for someone who makes decisions effecting other people’s lives, a good doctor is the one who can feel and connect with his or her patients.
Let us deal with the issue from a different perspective. How doctors themselves see and treat their profession?
Recently, I have had a discussion with a family friend who happens to be a doctor. Although she agrees on most of the points presented in the last article, she still says that the “ideal doctor,” the one who has both the technical edge and compassionate demeanor toward his patients and his job, is almost impossible to witness in the real life. Before demanding so much of doctors, she argues, you need to understand the challenges they are faced with in their profession. She, however, does not deviate from what the well-known author, Malcolm Gladwell, once said about fixing the medical system in the US: “To fix the health care crisis, the public needs to understand what it’s like to be a physician.”
Unarguably, it is one of the toughest professions a person could ever choose to pursue. It is frightening to live with the burden that most of the decisions you make on a daily basis have an impact on other lives. Once you step into the clinic, in the operation room, in the ER, you have to disassociate yourself from all your personal problems and responsibilities, to just leave them at the door; once in the white coat, you are totally dedicated to those seeking your help, your best of judgment.
No wonder medicine is one of the most stressful and depressing jobs. On an average, one doctor kills himself/herself every day according to the Journal of American Medical Association. The American National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health states that physicians are 1.87 times more likely to commit suicide compared to the national average, and some studies push that rate higher to 2.3 times among female doctors (all rates related to the US).
It seems that doctors are suffering in silence. Most of the discussions related to the medical field, whether in the United States or even here in the Kingdom, are about infrastructure (hospitals and equipment), patient satisfaction, or, of course, insurance; nobody seems to be tackling the doctors and their needs, the environment they are working in, the challenges they face.
Charles Reynolds, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine once commented on the high suicide rate among doctors: “[The] Undiagnosed and untreated depression is the culprit here.” The fact is that such untreated depression and unresolved workplace issues pile up and eventually lead to nothing but less satisfied, ill-treated patients, and more vital medical mistakes. One study published on cracked.com states, “If you randomly pull 100 medical charts, 40 will contain evidence of doctor errors.” That is a horrifying rate of errors.
We could continue for days talking about the challenges of the medical profession and we would yet scratch the service. Being a doctor might look like a prestigious endeavor, and it is indeed a prestigious and noble profession, but at the heart of it, there are a lot of difficulties and challenges. You should not expect a doctor in a private hospital to give his best when he is immersed in targets and profits calculations, and you cannot expect a doctor in a public hospital to give his/her best when she is asked to deal with an overwhelming number of patients, and to be drown in bureaucracy.
For a health care system to fly it needs two wings; qualified and well-selected medical practitioners as one wing, a productive and supportive environment in which they work as the other wing. Otherwise, the plane is doomed to crash.
