Doctors And Patience

Medical doctors. Definition: licensed medical practitioners. Nothing more or less. Yet many people view MDs as minor gods. The truth is that doctors are people, and we all know that people are not without their problems. Yes, doctors too, have problems. Do you think that it affects their work? Probably. They are only people after all, some better than others.

Mengele performed abominations upon human subjects in the guise of a researcher. MacDonald, a sociopath, slaughtered out of rage and then necessity. Jeff, the doctor, the Green Beret, the family killer.

"Jeff MacDonald had a fight, killed his wife and kids that night.

Easy evil, calm and suave he sleeps easy, amiable knave:

Easy evil, calm and well, going straight down into hell,

Going straight down into hell".

Somebody wrote that.

Harold Shipman is said to have murdered as many as  a thousand people and was convicted of killing fifteen. John Huntington Story, the infamous "Doc" of the Jack Olsen book of the same title did time for his rapes in Lovell, in the United States. MacDonald, Shipman and others like them are extreme examples, lives out of control, desperate and twisted by circumstances which they have created. Not all doctors are like those fellows.

Human, yet having to appear above the average and often driven by their personalities, MDs become gurus to some. Dr. Kildare charmed us for years with his good looks and his good will. Has any one seen Richard Chamberlain recently? Yet the surgeon shows continue on television and other media. Heroes and villains. Isn't that what it really is all about?

Many MDs today double as businessmen. I used to know a man who waited for an hour every time he visited his optician. Turned out that the specialist he was seeing was running a private practice while on contract to the current administration. He was late from his other job so his patients waited hours upon hours. They had little choice. He was, after all, a specialist. He might as well have told everybody to take a number. Bad bedside manner.

Undoubtedly there are many good doctors, dedicated people, for after all the sworn duty of a doctor is to alleviate suffering and to save lives. A dedicated and morally upright doctor does exactly that, and when he cannot he is compassionate towards his patients and to all their satellites, especially the bereaved.

Yet someone told me that the doctor who diagnosed her mother's eventually fatal condition and who disclosed it to her advised her to "go home and pray" and then charged her the normal fee without batting an eyelid. I wonder what that doctor was going to do for the rest of the day.

Assuming an equal level of competence in the practice of the medical trade, what accounts for the differences between doctors? It seems to me that, just like you and me, they are only people, and so are different from us and from each other. To put them on a pedestal somewhere up above the rest of us is absurd.

Let us rather try to have patience with them.