Why Doctors Suck

Full disclosure:  I am a doctor.  Having said that, sometimes doctors suck.

I have always been reluctant to identify with the title "Doctor." Perhaps that has a lot to do with the fact that somewhere, deep down, I knew I was on the wrong path and this was not my calling. It could also be low self-esteem, but that's a can of worms for another time... I think it also has a lot to do with the fact that, frankly, sometimes doctors suck. Not for nothing do you hear nurses complaining about doctors, patients complaining about doctors, pretty much anyone who ever interacts with doctors complaining about them. Why all the vitriol? 

Why Do Doctors Suck? For one, we’re rude. Arrogant. Perpetually running behind schedule. We interrupt.  e are perpetually multi-tasking and therefore don’t do any one thing to its best potential.  

We are entitled slobs. That's enough to start with...

Doctors are rude. We interrupt other people because what we have to say is so much more important – we went to medical school, didn't we? We have a quarter-million dollar education to impart, so listen up! Or perhaps it's because our time is at such a premium we have to get it out while we can, before moving on to the other ten thousand things demanding our attention. When you only have fifteen minutes with a patient and they are in danger of spending twenty minutes expounding on their family history of the vapours, you need to intervene a little!  It is important to keep the visit focused; however, trying to be efficient can have the side effect of being rude. I have always had an unfortunate tendency to interrupt, and becoming a physician did not improve this personality defect.

We yell at and talk down to lab techs, support staff, anyone "under" us. I personally strove to never do this, but I will admit to the occasional eye-roll over the phone as someone "clueless" attempted to answer my question or address my complaint. When one is being pulled in twenty directions at once, it can make one a little abrupt.  Sometimes even a little pissy. We're human beings, even if some doctors do succumb to Over-Inflated Ego Syndrome and identify with deities.

 I could tell stories of expletive-laced tirades, of people throwing sharp objects across the operating room, of plain old unprofessional, bad behaviour. What gives us the right to act like spoiled children? Historically, little has been done to address these problems, as doctors held all the power. Thankfully, this paradigm is changing, but change is slow in coming and it's hard to undo personality traits that have run rampant for thirty or forty years, in some cases, without check.

Doctors answer their cell phones in the middle of meetings, lectures, movies. I have never done this, I’d like to point out. My low self esteem at least had the benefit of counteracting the doctor-arrogance to which I might otherwise have succumbed. When possible, at lectures and conferences, I always took my pager/phone out of the room to answer if I was on call, and silenced it if I wasn’t. But I can’t tell you how many lectures I’ve been in, only to hear a phone ring, after we had been asked to silence such devices. Rude enough, I know, but then would come the loud “HELLO?”  And, more often than you would believe, an entire conversation would follow because the doctor in question couldn’t be bothered to leave the room so that others could focus on the presentation. (by the way, these were invariably men - coincidence?)

Why this rudeness? I think it becomes part of the training. You are so beaten down that you can’t remember to take other people into account. You are focused on surviving that hour, that night shift, that year of residency, that decade of training. At the same time, you are becoming highly educated, with things to say that people will want to listen to – indeed, will pay you to impart. This breeds an arrogance and contempt for other people’s time that I don’t know is entirely avoidable. Another reason for me to get out!

Speaking of contempt for time, doctors multi-task. Recent research on multi-tasking shows, no surprise, that when we try to do several things at once, we don’t do any one of them to the best of our ability. So your doctor who is trying to write a note on a patient, answer another patient’s question, respond to the nurse asking yet another question, and plan ahead for the surgery coming up - that doctor is not giving any of these tasks the attention it deserves. Blame it on the training. Multi-tasking is necessary when there are literally several things that need to be done NOW and only one person to do it. But it’s not a good thing. Yet another way our medical system is broken.

Offices running behind schedule....  another example of how doctor's time is perceived/treated as more valuable than the patient's. There's a lot to say here, but this is already getting very long... I'll just tell a little story.  
My mom was visiting me during residency, and I was giving her a tour of the hospital. I swiped my badge as we approached labor and delivery, and the large doors swung open automatically - I didn't even have to touch the door handle! I thought this was convenience and hygeine - my mother remarked, "ah, so this is where the sense of entitlement starts..." Good food for thought...

Finally, my personal pet peeve: Doctors are slobs. Walk into any physician or surgeon’s lounge at the hospital and there will be trash, half-eaten discarded food items, papers, and various detritus strewn about. Who do we expect to clean this up? Why the housecleaning staff, of course. It galls me every time I see it. Just because we have magical initials after our names, that does not entitle us to not clean up after ourselves.  Yes, I appreciate the housecleaning staff vacuuming the floors, dusting, wiping down tables, and generally making the office and lounge a nicer place to be. That’s their job. But that doesn’t mean I expect them to clean up my candy-wrappers or crumbs I’ve left behind, or trash I couldn't be bothered to throw away. Sorry, but it’s not okay. Clean Up After Yourself!!!!! End of rant. 

This all begs the question: Is it possible to become a doctor and retain some human decency? Of course it is.  But that's not as fun to write about.

Do you have other reasons that doctors suck?  Let me know and maybe I'll put them in my book!