The Doctor-Patient Relationship

I'm currently reading the book Bedside Manners by David Watts and am coming to the conclusion that there really isn't a great reference for what "good doctoring" should be.

Dr. Watts clearly cares about the profession of Medicine and feels an obligation to "do good" for his patients; however, he is torn by the human emotions of frustration, annoyance, and helplessness. There are the patients who are needlessly neurotic, who come in regularly for a barrage of tests that they don't need. There are those who are young and friendly and likable and these tend to be the patients for whom Dr. Watts can do nothing. It's funny that so many of the autobiographical, nonfiction accounts of medicine hark back to Shem's, The House of God, but there tends to be a parallel in that the young and healthy are always the ones to die (and the ones that the doctor's ultimately moved by) and it is the old who tend to have chronic, but tolerable ailments.

The New York Times Piece we read, "Radiologist Adds a Human Touch," it makes sense that the doctor-patient relationship is enhanced by acknowledging the humanity of our patients. But there are only a handful of fields in medicine where doctors are so disconnected from the person.

I do think that Dr. Watts treats his patients like people, he acknowledges their humanity, their idiosyncrasies, and their difficulties and he deals with them in very normal, human ways. I don't think it is fair to assume that doctors will always be able to be overwhelmingly compassionate or tolerant, there are very few people that can behave in this fashion. But I think it's important to realize why your patients behave in certain ways and to try to work with their flaws to provide the best treatment, in hopefully, a professional or even friendly manner.

On a side note I think that the term doctor-patient relationship assumes that the behavior of one party is entirely contingent on that of another. And while I don't think that doctors are obligated to deal with verbal abuse (Dr. Watt's recounts a patient who would constantly criticize him without reproach, but when he criticized his family he stood his ground), I do think that we ought to realize that people often come to us at their most vulnerable and that we need to view our duties as a profession and provide people with the best quality of care regardless of our feeling toward the patient.