Perhaps this link will help. I, also, thank you Kathleen. You are completly accurate in your analysis.
–dag–

Let me say as a patient, thank you Kathleen.
My aunt retired early from nursing for the very same reasons you mention. She particularly disliked working with her hospital’s surgeons, whom she felt as a group had serious attitude problems (the “tin god” thing).
Maybe today’s nursing shortage will help turn things around so that nurses get treated better and a little more humanity is brought back into medicine.

I have long asked for the med schools to find a way to keep them out, but in vain. Instead they are allowed to prey freely on the public.

But the present system doesn’t weed them out either. On the contrary, psychopaths can take any criticism, trial, warning and downright abuse without feeling bad about it, as it is (they feel) always someone else’s fault.

Normal people, on the other hand, are dropping out of medicine, scaling down their practices, being burned-out or changing into what they perceive as low-risk specialities. Some migrate to other countries where they can practice medicine with a measure of fulfilment denied to them in the developed world. And, tragically, as we have seen, some commit suicide.

So the present system is an evolutionary experiment where doctors with normal sensitivities are systematically being weeded out, while the medical psychopaths remain working, happy and carefree. If they are really squeezed, they can relocate to another state and even change their names.

I don’t know if I agree with the stupid part (med school/residency tends to weed out that crew), but 10% psychopath…definitely. I rarely interact with other docs after hours. I tend to gravitate to real people not pompous asses. Lord knows the process tends to interst the pompous and nutty (though smart).

Kathleen:
See my post above. I tend to agree that a subset of docs do brush off RN’s professional opinions. They don’t realize (especially in the inpatient setting) YOU are the primary caregiver not us. The time constraints in medicine are getting worse and worse, exacerbating a bad situation. Medicare is making it harder and harder on docs, patients, and RN’s. The only time I get irritated is when an RN is trying to force my hand by playing “doctor” in a circumstance when I clearly know they are wrong.

As a nurse of 30 plus years experience, I understand & appreciate the feelings on both sides.

I started out in nursing in the ’70′s. Back then, physicians were still “walking on water”. Our patients were in awe of their vast knowledge & skills – and were dutifully respectful.

That was a time though when physicians communicated more, were more empathetic, held a patient’s hand once in a while, took the time to look into a patient’s eyes & really listen to them.

However, things changed. More & more, we would be at a patient’s bedside and watch as the MD zoomed his way through, barely taking enough time to say hello, much less answer questions.

What the physicians usually didn’t hear though was verbalized feelings of frustration & anger from their patients.

As the next couple decades went by, things get worse. I worked in the home health field then & can’t count the number of times we nurses tried to talk to physicians about their patients, only to be brushed off.

When I finally left the field, it had gotten to the point, they wouldn’t even talk to us. We had to go through the gatekeeper – even when it came to taking orders. It made many of us very uncomfortable & was one of the reasons I finally left.

Between the changes in medicare & the insurance industry, putting severe constraints on everyone, and the hassle with physicians, it just wasn’t worth it anymore.

If it was so hard for us nurses to talk to the physicians, how much more so was it for their patients? How many times did patients feel bushed off? Plenty, I can tell you! We nurses usually got an earful.

Now, things are even worse. Now we all get taped “menues” we have to sit through when we call, and our 15 minute allotment when we visit. Many people feel it’s become assembly line medicine and that makes everyone unhappy – providers & patients alike.

When patients are frustrated, unhappy, and feel like their physician could care less, they are less forgiving of mistakes.

In all my years of nursing, I never sensed that it was perfection patients were looking for. What they are looking for is respect, competency, and caring coming from the people they have to trust their lives to.

Since all doctor’s are also part of all humanity, should we now consider that atleast 20% of them are either stupid or a psychopath?

That’s 1 of every 5 doctors that is either one or the other. Thats kind of shocking news.

The “expert” witness system in our country is a joke.

Doctors make 10 times more money as a lawyer whore “expert” than they make in clinical medicine.

Its a tremendous incentive to lie/mislead juries.

I have yet to see any complaint when the same providers are bedding the same attorneys that they cry about when it comes to the personal injury world or the criminal defense world. In regards to the former, we all know the prostitues that the the plaintiff’s attornies can trot out that are willing to opine “to a reasonable degree of medical certainty” that the plaintiff’s TBI, multi-level cervical and lumbar DDD, bilateral posterior horn medial meniscal tears, bilateral supraspinatus tears and CTS were all caused by the 1 oe 2 mile per hour change in speed rear-end impact. All of this comes without any objective evaluation of the underlying history (I have yet to see a provider be able to reconstruct a collision from physical evidence) and is solely based on the “patient said they were asymptomatic prior to the accident” and the ability to diagnose a condition (with no singular unique history). I think we all know that this biased unverifiable post hoc ergo propter hoc illogic is unscientific (in the least). If the word of the “patient” is enough to assess causation in the PI world then the same standard should apply to the med-mal world. Instead, we see a very interesting dichotomy on the reliability of patients and their character as a direct function of the role of the provider as a profiteer/defendant.

In the second instance – the Twinkie Defense, the Prozac Defense, the BS psychiatric excuses for every criminal, thug and child molester in order to avoid responsibility for their actions.

The medical community has a lot of cleaning up to do in their own camp before they can reasonably complain about the legal system.