What I Believe The Public Should Know About Clinicians

The daughter of the patient walked out of the room livid.  She was convinced that the nurse had no business taking care of patients.  She seethed as she recounted all the supposed injuries and mistakes that had occurred.  I took a deep breath and paused for a moment, trying to collect my thoughts.The daughter didn't know that I had watched this same nurse successfully perform CPR on a man the day before, and her quick thinking was one of the factors that save his life.  She had once recognized a rare side effect of a medication, and solved a clinical mystery that had hounded doctors, hospitals, and pharmacists for months. In my mind, she was the best that clinical medicine had to offer.  Knowledgeable, kind, intuitive.But this trend has been escalating over the last few years.  Patients and families wagging their fingers and nodding their heads angrily in the direction of clinicians.  Doctors, nurses, and therapists have been accused of being incompetent, lazy, or downright cruel. There is a basic loss of faith in the ability of our healthcare practitioners. I think that the Internet plays a role.  The ability to Google one's symptoms and come up with a host of diagnoses has made the populace feel that medicine is easy.  Furthermore, the lay press and some of our own physicians and administrators decry the system as befouled by errors.  They say that we account for as much death and disability as heart disease and cancer. Whil...
Source: In My Humble Opinion - Category: Primary Care Authors: Source Type: blogs