Lessons from a Medical Student
I wish all doctors made it this easy to determine whether to use their services or not. This MUSC medical student named Katie has taken all of the guessing out of the equation for me. She has basically made it known that she believes that telling patients as little as possible is in her best interest. The things that make her life easier is all she seems to care about in here recent posting on a blog run by three MUSC medical students. That is the root of my concern when it comes to dealing with medical professionals these days. Here is a bit of her posting:
Don’t tell patients anything. Fight the urge. You want to seem like good member of their care team by explaining the plan and their options. But don’t. Trust me, it will only placate them in the interim.
Katie is not yet an MD, but I do still have a chance of running into her during one of my son’s hospital stays. I try my best to keep things positive and upbeat on this blog these days, but I can not let this one slide. It is a huge pet peeve of mine. My wife and I have a few good friends who have kids with complex medical issues who detest this attitude as well. They are well educated with plenty of life experience not to mention the extensive trial by fire medical training related to the complex issues related to their own children’s conditions.
I spoke last week with a family in San Antonio on this very subject. I mentioned in my last posting that I had dinner with a great family in San Antonio. The friends of the hostess had a child with a rare chromosome deformity. My son Caden has a micro deletion of the 22nd chromosome and we were comparing notes on the care of our children. One of my only negative comments of the evening was on this very subject. I felt convicted about spreading such negativity without knowing for sure that doctors actually do this information hording on purpose. My wife has been told of one doctor at MUSC who admitted to our friend Stephanie that he felt that she did not really need to know everything he was considering about her son’s case. What gives the doctor the right to make this decision? I don’t remember ever signing anything that waived my right to information about my son’s health or my own. As a matter of fact, my wife and I just met with my son’s cardiologist today to gather more details on Caden’s heart condition. There is a chance he will need to have more open-heart surgery in the future and we have not been given the same story at every visit with this department in the past. They do great work, but they don’t always tell you what is going in the patient record. We have begun to make contact with other clinics outside of MUSC to treat some of Caden’s other conditions. We want to make sure we are fully informed before moving to fast with care at other facilities.
I basically want to say that I was disturbed to read Katie’s posting titled Lesson of the Day. I don’t know if Katie is even her real name, but you can bet your bottom dollar that I will respectfully request that this medical student along with anyone sharing her attitude be removed from my son’s care team in a heartbeat. I only want medical professionals working on my son who are putting his care first and foremost. I want to be fully informed when making a care choice related to my son’s health. I know that doctors, nurses, and even medical students have lives and feelings of their own. They have a right to guard themselves from pain and uncomfortable situations, but not at the expense of a patient’s health. When they are making decisions related to my health or one of my family members then I want them to be primarily concerned about the patient and not about how tough their job might be if they share too much information. I am sure there are cases where sharing too much information might complicate some situations and there are definitely exceptions regarding emergency circumstances. Outside of that, a patient who wants the whole story should be given every bit of information requested.
I sincerely hope that this is an isolated attitude tied to this one medical student. I also hope that this thinking is not being taught in our medical schools. There is a good chance that she came up with this philosophy on her own, but I would not count on it.