{"id":4380,"date":"2011-11-21T17:24:01","date_gmt":"2011-11-21T23:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/?p=4380"},"modified":"2022-03-21T15:13:58","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T20:13:58","slug":"arrogant-doctors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/21\/arrogant-doctors","title":{"rendered":"Arrogant Doctors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve been curious for some time about the arrogance and rudeness in my profession. When a new patient starts to relate her health history and interrupts herself with a comment like, \u201cThe so-and-so doctor was awful\u201d (or really unpleasant or disrespectful), I inquire \u201cOh? What happened?\u201d And she\u2019s truly glad<\/em> to tell someone, especially a seemingly sympathetic member of the offending profession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After years of listening to patient complaints about doctors, there are few surprises. Most commonly it\u2019s a variation of \u201cdidn\u2019t listen to me,\u201d \u201cdidn\u2019t take my opinions seriously,\u201d \u201ckept interrupting and talked down to me,\u201d \u201cgot impatient answering my questions,\u201d \u201cgot defensive when I challenged his\/her conclusions,\u201d or generally was visibly preoccupied with something more important than the patient in front of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I typed \u201cphysician arrogance\u201d into my Google bar, I found a couple of chat rooms where doctors were defending their behavior with \u201cWe\u2019re too rushed,\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t have time to review a bunch of stuff you happened to find online,\u201d and the supremely super-arrogant \u201cLike it or not, we do know what\u2019s best for you.\u201d I pictured these angry patients and defensive doctors like two semi-crazed terriers on opposite sides of a cyclone fence yapping furiously at each other into eternity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To me, there are two forms of physician arrogance:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first is the physician with one of your basic personality disorders<\/strong> who really shouldn\u2019t have gone into medicine in the first place. The idea of weeding out these docs beforehand–medical damage control, so to speak–was addressed in an editorial in the British Medical Journal<\/em> several years ago. It suggested that along with good grades, recommendations from professors, and the clich\u00e9d desire to help others as criteria for acceptance into medical school, every potential candidate should undergo extensive psychological testing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previous studies in the UK have shown that \u201csuccessful\u201d GPs (competent, respected, well-liked by patients) were as a whole rather extroverted individuals who sincerely enjoyed people and weren\u2019t schlepping a knapsack of unresolved psychological baggage. I\u2019ve come across no shortage of the unresolved issues crowd, highly introverted or narcissistic individuals who need Valium to make eye contact with their patients and who generally regard all patients as an interference to their self-absorption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a while I wondered how these physicians could ever build a practice and financially survive until I realized almost all of them became salaried specialists employed by huge medical groups. As long as these doctors remained reasonably competent in their field, their behavioral problems were either not noticed or deliberately overlooked by their colleagues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These guys virtually never got fired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second form of physician arrogance seems an institutional phenomenon<\/strong>, in which a whole culture of arrogance permeates everything associated with the medical center, from its hospital on down through its residency training program and medical school, even including its undergraduate school if one exists. In other words, a historical arrogance passed from generation to generation, a whole self-enclosed medical\/academic culture whose members are thoroughly convinced their collective digestive tracts produce odor-free feces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without naming names (you institutions do know who you are), anyone living in Chicago after a few years can differentiate the basic jerk institutions from the generally nice ones. Not surprisingly, these same places are often brutal to their employees and create utterly dysfunctional workplace environments. But these institutions who know who they are really don\u2019t care, do they? Of course, they wouldn\u2019t care, they\u2019re\u2026Is this what tautology<\/a> means?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re uncertain who\u2019s who in this regard, my suggestion for honing your arrogance-detection radar (Arro-dar for short) is to keep track of the time you spend waiting to see your doctor or waiting in an emergency room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To me, repeatedly keeping someone waiting is the height of rudeness. Acknowledging that I personally have the patience of a hungry rat, I dislike waiting for anything. Keep me waiting a couple of times–maybe some sort of an emergency occurred–and I can forgive. Recurring, unconscionably long waits and I\u2019m out of there and you should be too, because encounters like these will likely predict every subsequent visit within this institution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you find yourself in an emergency room and realize that you\u2019ve knocked off a dozen chapters of War and Peace<\/em> and no one has seen you, trust me, it won\u2019t get a whole lot better once you\u2019re admitted. On the other hand, if you\u2019re in a doctor\u2019s office or ER and see a sign that reads, \u201cPlease let us know if you have been waiting longer than 15 minutes,\u201d the whole center is being run by someone who keeps track of patient satisfaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a primary care physician, my own arrogance radar is much different, based largely on how well an institution\u2019s specialists communicate with me. You\u2019d think that in a huge multispecialty medical center, relying very much on referred patients from us primaries, communication would be a non-issue, but this is too often not the case. From some centers after I refer a patient I hear nothing, utter silence, the patient apparently having fallen off the planet. My inquiry calls are not returned. Occasionally, adding insult to injury, I later discover the specialist referred my patient to the institution\u2019s own primary care department for follow-up care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But at opposite end, at really good medical centers the specialist will call or fax over the consultation notes–often within an hour of your visit–and follow up with copies of test results, x-rays, and a summary letter (often closing with a \u201cthanks for having confidence in our institution\u201d). All this provides me with a lot of information on how you, my patient, fared, and after all that\u2019s what I\u2019m here for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me end this by adding: Do not tolerate physician arrogance, period. If you\u2019re sitting in the waiting room and your longevity and good will are being chipped away reading endless back issues of People Magazine, just exit and find someone else. If you leave any encounter with a doctor feeling tense and angry from your experience, then every single time you have an appointment you\u2019ll have a vaguely sick feeling about the potential stress ahead. Your concerns will never be adequately addressed, your questions will remain unanswered, and you\u2019ll feel bad to boot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is really not healthy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of the recession and the health insurance crises, American Medical News reported this week that people are going to their doctors less often than ever. Office visits are down. Referrals to specialists are down. Elective surgery is way down. In other words, health care is becoming a buyer\u2019s market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You really never again have to pay to suffer through some doctor\u2019s arrogance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Be well,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Edelberg, MD<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS:  At WholeHealth Chicago, we\u2019re somewhat obsessive about being on time. Practitioners who run late get their knuckles soundly rapped at staff meetings. I hate to throw the blame back onto patients, but if you find yourself waiting in our center, the single most common reason is that a patient scheduled earlier in the day arrived late and threw the whole day\u2019s schedule out of whack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been curious for some time about the arrogance and rudeness in my profession. When a new patient starts to relate her health history and interrupts herself with a comment like, \u201cThe so-and-so doctor was awful\u201d (or really unpleasant or disrespectful), I inquire \u201cOh? What happened?\u201d And she\u2019s truly glad to tell someone, especially a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2087,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,2,2333,50,3],"tags":[1317],"class_list":["post-4380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a","category-blog","category-functional-medicine","category-healthy-lifestyle","category-knowledge-base","tag-arrogant-doctors"],"yoast_head":"\r\nArrogant Doctors<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The first is the physician with one of your basic personality disorders who really shouldn\u2019t have gone into medicine in the first place.\" \/>\r\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\r\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/21\/arrogant-doctors\" \/>\r\n<meta 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