Can you trust your doctor? A medical heretic exposes the medical mystique

Most people think highly of their doctors. They want their doctors to be objective, scientific, unbiased, and yet loving, compassionate, and sensitive. In short, they want doctors who are more holy healers than human beings.

It makes sense that people want this from their doctors. When you’re lying on the exam table with the doctor exploring your anus, vagina, penis, or other embarrassing organ, you want to believe that the person doing this to you is pure, sane, honest, competent, and doing what’s best for you. . You don’t want to think that the doctor is a pervert with a title and a license to abuse.

Well, I’m afraid I have bad news for you. I’ve been in medicine, and I know.

Put yourself in the shoes of a doctor. At one time, he or she was just like you, a layman. They went to kindergarten and elementary school and did what they were told, learned how to take tests and get the expected answers, and as a result, they got high grades. They kept doing this until they entered medical school. They were selected for their grades and test scores.

For some jobs, applicants must take personality tests to give some indication of their character. Are they antisocial, are they honest, would they steal? You would like to know this about employees before giving them a job. However, for those applying for the job of doctor, there is no such test of character. Applicants are selected through academic tests. And these people will be entrusted with human lives.

Would getting high scores in chemistry, physics, or math make you a great doctor? Of course not. Does knowing physiology, anatomy and biochemistry make you compassionate? They can make you a good physiologist, anatomist, or biochemist, but they have nothing to do with compassion. In fact, since most of medical science relies heavily on cruel animal research, torturing and killing millions of dogs, cats, monkeys, rats, and other animals every year, nothing could be further from compassion. than the field of medicine.

In fact, medical education is deliberately designed to desensitize laymen to blood and gore so they can become physicians. Dealing with sick people, some in severe pain, anxious, fearful, helpless, requires a cool head. It is important for doctors to remain calm when everyone else is on edge. In the real world, of course, you have to learn to be cool and collected in a crisis. Since the medical student is not selected by anything other than exam results, the fact is that most students cannot live up to this ideal. If all you had to do with patients was get their written health history and take a test about what medicine to give them, it wouldn’t be a problem for doctors, especially if the tests are multiple choice like they are in high school. medicine and in the medical license tests.

But healthcare requires different skills and personalities than just taking multiple-choice tests. This is why medicine has so many specialties for students to choose from. Medical school takes four years to complete. The first two years are textbooks and labs. The last two years you can try different medical specialties for a few weeks or a couple of months, to see what suits your tastes. Some people like the thrill of a crisis. They usually go to emergency medicine. They enjoy the adrenaline rush of a heart attack or car accident. They don’t like to see people dying slowly from chronic diseases and medication side effects. They prefer medical speed to long-term commitment. Come get yourself fixed and refer to another doctor for follow-up.

Others who get a jolt of stress go into surgery. Imagine the thrill you feel when you open up a stranger’s chest, blood spurts everywhere, the nurses give you clamps to stop the flow, the machines beep faster for the patient’s pulse and breathing, the nurse wipes your Sweat dripping from his brow, the anesthesiologist warns him that the patient is going into cardiac arrest, while at the same time staying above the fray in his outward demeanor, cracking dirty jokes with the nurses and talking about resorts from Shared time with the anesthesiologist. What a job!

For those who prefer to be more like the doctor of old, there is family medicine. You can see children, fathers, pregnant mothers, the elderly, the whole range of humanity and with all kinds of problems. When the going gets tough, just send them off to some other specialist. People come to trust you and tell you the secrets of their life. This is light medicine, a great specialty for relaxed people.

I remember a family doctor I went to for a checkup when I turned 30, at a time in my life before I entered medicine and when I still believed in having routine checkups. He did a complete exam, including a rectal exam to look for an enlarged prostate and other signs of inflammation. I didn’t expect it. “Drop your pants and bend over,” he told me. He was a tall, blond, handsome doctor, about 6′ 4″, single, but apparently straight. “Is that really necessary?” I asked. “Yes.” So I leaned over. He put a small condom on his finger , I slid some Vaseline on it, and it went in, as I frowned in disgust.”How’s your sex life?” He didn’t even take me out to lunch.

Not long after being admitted to medical school. Before I started classes, I volunteered at a local low-income health clinic, hoping to gain more experience. They dressed me in a white lab coat, called me a “student doctor,” and before long I was doing a pelvic exam on an 18-year-old woman. The doctor did the exam first and then instructed me to palpate the cervix as I uncomfortably slid my gloved hand into the strange woman’s slightly odorous vagina. My lay days were ending. They were already giving me access to people’s bodies.

I suppose some guys would have been envious, as long as the pus didn’t turn you off. Imagine what kind of men become gynecologists. They go so far as to tell women to strip for them all day, all kinds of women. They can then insert their fingers into their vaginas, anuses, and feel their breasts. They want their patients to feel like they’re experts on women, even if they’re just men and have never had a period, worn a bra, or had a strange guy explore their vaginas.

Of course, there is a downside to this specialty. What would it do to your sense of women to have to examine diseased, smelly, pus-filled vaginas every day? When your wife gets amorous, does she reflexively reach for her glove and lube?

While most gynecologists are men, urologists are not mostly women. Women are willing to let a strange doctor taste their genitals. But most men would feel weird if a female doctor tasted their penises. Of course, it feels strange for a man to taste your penis too. What kind of man is drawn to urology and the lifelong specialty of treating penile and prostate problems?

The same can be asked of proctologists. Imagine, as a medical student, if you found it exciting to work with the rectum and colon. What would seeing butts all day, year after year, do to your sense of humanity?

As you can see, it can be difficult to choose a specialty. If you are truly an idealistic person and have turned to medicine to end suffering, you will be met with some disappointment and aggravation. I know a rheumatologist who could no longer bear to watch her patients slowly die, unable to do much to alleviate her suffering. She decided to change her specialty and become an anesthesiologist, so that all of her patients would be unconscious and she would not have to meet them personally.

Those medical students who don’t fit into any other mold and are a little weird often become psychiatrists, escaping blood and guts in search of the mind. Psychiatrists who are themselves a basket case often feel great emotional relief and increased self-esteem simply by listening to other people’s problems throughout the day, which makes psychiatry very therapeutic for the clinician. This is an especially attractive specialty for medical students who enjoy LSD or peyote and stayed high for most of their basic science training. They can really get into people’s twisted fantasies and hallucinations. But watch out for the power-hungry psychiatrist. They can call you crazy, lock you up, and keep you high for the rest of your life, if they want to.

In fact, doctors have all kinds of powers over the public. They are licensed to practice with people with medications and surgery. As a doctor, you can accidentally kill a patient, or make it look accidental, and get away with it if you can prove it was standard medical procedure. And you can even bill the deceased patient’s estate for services. Now that’s power. This power is attractive to some people, which is why they became doctors in the first place. Of course, as in politics, anyone who is attracted to power is precisely the kind of person who should not get it. People who grow up wanting to be called “Doctors” all the time and have the power, money, and prestige that our culture bestows on the medical profession are not necessarily the best people to treat patients fairly, sensitively, and caringly. taking into account the interests of patients. . These doctors do not attend to the health needs of their patients. Patients meet their doctor’s energy needs.

Along with the power of medicine comes money. Above all, medicine is a business. He’s in the business of treating disease, which means the doctor does it best when he’s sick, not when he’s well. This makes the doctor, like the auto mechanic, invest in you by breaking down. It means that the doctor is invested in disease and treatment, and is the enemy of health and prevention. If you went to medical school to help heal humanity, this sad fact about the basic and underlying financial impetus of medicine may be enough to make you leave the profession. He made me quit. It also made me realize that if you want to be healthy, you have to stop doing things that make you sick, including going to the doctor.

So the next time you’re tested, keep in mind that the person doing the polling is no different from anyone else. They are not necessarily saints who take a vow of poverty to treat the sick and help prevent disease. They are not necessarily impartial, objective and mature people who can distance their personal feelings from their work. They are just normal people who have been given a license to practice with you. They have the same perversions, prejudices, stupidity, self-interest, and petty lives as the rest of humanity, but they are drawn into the lucrative and powerful business of disease.

Say: “Ouch!”