Crappy Doctors
My friend Val Jones MD put this on her blog and then on another site. It is making the rounds for good reason. It portrays this one gastroenterologist as the complete douche that he is. I saw a lot of these doctors in medical school, residency and even early in my career. Thankfully, most are gone. Some, though, are still around. They were either born as douchebags or nurtured into becoming a douchebag by the system or specialty but it doesn’t matter. A douchebag is still a douchebag. This line captures it all:
I persist in my attempts to understand the details, to which he shouts “Shut up and listen” with increasing decibels.
So though I am very protective of doctors on this site it doesn’t mean I think all are perfect. Does this guy need to be reported to the state board? Not for being a douche. He just needs for patients to let it be known that they will not see him. The word will get around and he will suffer that way. Capitalism can work.
My hospital issues comment cards to patients as a quality metric. One way to weed out bad apples, or at least sanction them for unprofessional or otherwise rude behavior.
In the world in general, the character of every community can be viewed in terms of how the community rejects the rude and sociopathic, and how it supports the respectful, mannered and kind.
It is no surprise that the meat-processing system that stamps potential medical students as “Prime” is based on the same slashing, competitive myth that the rest of society condones, from pre-school T-ball to the MBA. A*holes win, and you don’t have to go into a clinic to see the most egregious examples. Our movies, songs and online entertainment are directed towards aggression and the relief of frustration. From the city bus to the DMV, we live in a world that tolerates the hostile and abusive. Sometimes a colonoscopy is merely a long tube with an A-hole on each end. We reap what we sow.