Imminent Failure Of Doctor - Patient Relationships
Posted: Monday, January 04, 2010
by Olufemi Ladeinde
Rencare Limited
The audio version of this article is available. Just press play.
In the last fifty years there have been major advances in health care with the introduction of organ transplantation, joint replacement, heart surgery techniques, and effective therapies for cancer and hypertension. However, proposals are being constantly offered to assure and improve the performance of doctors and to protect the safety of patients. Patients place a large amount of trust in their doctors, and the doctor/patient relationship is regarded as sacrosanct.
Take a closer look at this relationship. Would you, as a patient, tell a doctor you are meeting for the first time your innermost secrets? Not likely! For a while, the doctor is on trial and can only gradually gain the confidence of the patient by the way he allows the relationship to develop. My professor told me on my graduation day that I had only become a technician and would become a doctor only on the day a patient asks to see me and no other doctor. It took 5 years to reach that point! It was the proudest moment of my professional life. A patient came in and was offered the option of seeing my boss who had far more experience than I had. She politely insisted she would rather see me.
Some of the latest proposals ostensibly created to protect patients and ensure higher standards of delivery have actually eroded the relationship. Patients are becoming more litigious and are now allowed to make issues public. Doctors are wary of taking decisions, in the best interest of the patient, which they would automatically have taken before, because of the fear of being sued later in the light of new developments or hypotheses. In this situation, lawyers and insurance companies may make great profit; but who is losing out? The patient!
Patients need to have hope. It is a priceless commodity for them. Hope comes when patients feel something can be done for their illness and they will be actively involved in their treatment, armed with knowledge that has been provided by their doctor. Hope is born when a physician looks into a patient's face and a human connection is established and hope deepens when a patient feels free to talk and a doctor listens carefully. Most of the time a patient arrives with apprehension, maybe even fear. If a doctor succeeds in removing the fear by providing knowledge not only about what may be wrong, but also about a way forward to rid the patient of their condition, the patient is usually happy to follow the doctor s instructions and plan. With today s conditions, the doctor no longer has the time, or the inclination to invest time, to get to the root problem of the patient and design individual solutions.
The medical drama that occurs between doctor and patient has to do with a patient's willingness to believe that a doctor can and wants to help him. That faith has great impact, independent of the natural course of an illness or other physiological interventions.
We hear many complaints about doctors and healthcare, but what complaints do doctors have about their patients? What can the patients learn from knowing what those complaints might be? Some patients are difficult, nasty, obnoxious or disruptive. They may be angry, and fairly so, due to previous experiences either with the same doctor or another one. Some patients place unrealistic responsibility on their doctors. A doctor asks an obese patient to lose weight to help control her diabetes. She doesn't but returns time and again for more drugs or knee surgery or and gets upset when her doctor can no longer fix things for her. Doctors have a lot of frustration from patients like these. Some patients demand treatments doctors are unwilling or unable to provide or prescribe. Sometimes such treatments may not be in the patient s best interest.
Finally, the doctor/patient relationship is a two-way street that is becoming clogged up. We owe a duty to unclog it and restore faith in the system.
This Article has been viewed 969 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (4 total)Interesting read. Gone are the days when you knew your family doctor, trusted him and liked him to boot! Thanks for the perspective.
Great article. My sister is a doctor and I'm a small business owner. We discuss this topic often as we swap stories and advice. She has a much tougher battle as a business owner than I do by far, and she didn't start medicine to become a business owner. Her challenges dealing with patient-customers are much tougher than anything I have to deal with.
Looks like the US is not the only nation with health care problems.... as an RN I do hear you! Marijo
Congrats on placing HIGH in reader's choice! Marijo
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.