Impersonal and self-absorbed as Manhattan may be, it’s still embarrassing to cry on West 32nd Street. I looked for a store, any store, and ducked inside. The pace of my steps and angle of my head as I buried myself into a back corner, thumbing through pants twice my size, gave me away. A store clerk walked over and asked if I was okay. I knew I’d have to meet her eyes, unable to hide the tell-tale redness and puffiness of my own. I asked if they had a bathroom I could use.
Being Manhattan, there was no customer bathroom, but the store clerk very gently led me to the staff bathroom and told me to take the time I needed. After five minutes of some fairly heavy crying, I spent the next ten desperately trying to disguise what I had just done. I scrubbed my face until it hurt and molded my expression back into that of stoic, aloof New Yorker. My insides didn’t feel much better, but at least my outsides didn’t betray that anymore. I emerged, thanked the clerk, and took comfort in the fact that I’d never see her again.
My little episode had only intensified the all-consuming ringing in my ears. The tinnitus had started two years ago, suddenly and unrelentingly. Five doctors and five clean bills of health later, I was left with the unchanging advice: “We’ve ruled out anything organic and tinnitus isn’t dangerous, so you’ll just have to get used to it.” No follow-up appointment necessary.
I was left to my own devices–which included the Internet, snake oil supplements, and my own obsessive mind–and I wasn’t using them well. Besides being sleepless, irritable, and depressed, the far more damning thing was that I was without any hope. I couldn’t imagine being able to live happily in my body.
Thinking back, I still can’t figure out why it didn’t dawn on me to consider a psychiatrist instead of an ENT or a neurologist. The idea to see him wasn’t even my own.
After getting to know me, the psychiatrist eventually suggested medications. I wasn’t afraid of the side effects, and I began immediately.
A year and a half later, everything is much better, objectively and subjectively. Though not gone, the auditory disturbances are manageable to the point where they hardly register emotionally. I don’t much like talking about it, for reasons better articulated by Russell Crowe’s character in A Beautiful Mind: ”I still see things that are not here. I just choose not to acknowledge them. Like a diet of the mind, I just choose not to indulge certain appetites.”
Of course, most times I go to the doctor, for any purpose, I am asked about the reasons I am on certain medications. Usually my answer is acknowledged, and the appropriate empathetic response is conveyed.
Recently, I was surprised by one doctor’s version of empathy: “Oh, yes, tinnitus can make you literally want to drive off a bridge.”
Of course, this doctor doesn’t know that 18 months ago, I broke down in midtown Manhattan and wondered how I could live out the rest of my life at this rate. She assumes by my demeanor that I am well-adjusted and perhaps always have been. She doesn’t know that sometimes when I listen with my stethoscope for a patient’s heartbeat and I hear ringing, that familiar fear makes my own chest tighten. Or that sometimes I “indulge” in anxiousness when a tinnitus spike occurs that I cannot ignore. Or that the very condition she was treating me for was creating such a spike at that moment.
Regardless, I was in “no acute distress,” as the medical lingo goes. I let it go.
I wasn’t even angry with her off-the-cuff remark. I say silly things to patients on a weekly basis, and the only reason it isn’t more frequently is that I only see patients once a week.
What reminded me of her remark was a piece by Dr. Danielle Ofri in the New York Times, which was inspired by a New England Journal of Medicine article by Dr. Jerome Groopman and Dr. Pamela Hartzband.
All three doctors rail against the term “provider” instead of “doctor” for a number of reasons: the generic term connotes sterility, commodification, distance, and interchangeability. ”The words we use to explain our roles are powerful,” Groopman and Hartzband explain. ”They set expectations and shape behavior.”
This is all fair. And, as a medical student, I should be in especially staunch agreement. But I’m not. As a patient, I’ve seen far more “providers” than “doctors.”
I went to the doctor who made the unfortunate comment about my tinnitus because I had an unrelated problem. She took me seriously, she diagnosed me correctly, she prescribed the appropriate medications, and I got better. Technically, flawless. She provided excellent care.
But, Groopman and Hertzband write when we use a term like “provider,” it ignores “the essential psychological, spiritual, and humanistic dimensions of the relationship.”
From a patient’s point of view, though, all it takes it one insensitive comment from the physician to lose that humanistic dimension. When my doctor made that remark, I relegated her to the impersonal role of provider, someone incapable of understanding my experience but capable of treating my physical problem. I just wanted to get better. As Dr. Ofri writes, “It makes [physicians] feel like a vending machine pushing out hermetically sealed bags of ‘health care’ after the ‘consumer’s’ dollar bill is slurped eerily in.” That is exactly how I saw my doctor.
Was I happy with the care I got? Sure. If I have another problem, will I see her again? Probably. Was I bothered by her remark? A little. Did I care? Not really. I didn’t care because I depersonalized her immediately after. If I cared, the remark would hurt. I don’t want to hurt. Is that fair to the doctor? Maybe not, but I care more about me.
This example is far from unique, for me and for others as well. There are many reasons people dislike doctors, and many of these reasons are not particularly fair. But when the same complaints are heard over and over again (“He doesn’t listen to me!” ”I can’t believe she said that!” ”He doesn’t understand!”), one has to wonder which came first–the term “provider” or the doctor acting like one.
I’m not dismissing the argument that “provider” is irksome or suggesting that we shouldn’t spend space discussing its consequences. But I wanted to spend some space on rationalizing why patients may already think in these terms: on how in many cases physical provision of health care is exactly what doctors do, and on how depersonalizing doctors can actually protect patients when their emotional or humanistic care is lacking. And the term “provider” sometimes fits, even if doctors don’t want to wear it.
“But words do influence us,” Dr. Ofri writes about what doctors are called. Yes, they do. Now let’s take those thoughts and apply them to what doctors say too.
Shara Yurkiewicz is a medical student who blogs at This May Hurt a Bit.
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