Physician-Patient Relationships

Doctors seen as G-O-D, and that’s just not right!  From the child of a physician, who’d watched her/his father treated an assortment of patients that came into the clinic, translated…

Awhile ago, at the start of the outbreaks of MERS-CoV, it’d reminded of the cholera outbreak when I just started in middle school.  The government enforced the members of the public to get vaccinated, people started lining up outside my father’s clinic, he got too busy he’d not had time to eat his meals, and he’d had my mother shown up, to tell the locals to wait, for him to have his lunch first, then, to continue to help them get inoculated; and, there was someone in the crowd who’d mumbled, “The outbreaks are getting very serious, and he still had the mind to eat?”

A hot summer’s day in my first summer in high school, I was falling into a daze when I heard a woman screamed, as she’d run into my father’s clinic: “HELP!”, and, a mother with hair all messy rushed in with a naked child into my home, started wailing aloud, “Doctor, please save him!”, my father quickly opened up the eyes of the boy, used the flashlight, then, told her that there wasn’t the needed equipment at my house, that she should rush him to a major hospital, to NOT delay the time for treatment.

people have the tendency to do this!placing the medical professionals on that high pedestal, thus, expecting them to perform miracles that can’t be performed!  illustration found online

From the gathering crowd came, “just give that kid a shot of adrenaline into the heart and he shall be revived!”, then, “yeah!  Yeah!”, someone hollered out to my father, “Sir, quick, that shot!”, my father disregarded the crowd that’s all worked up, told the woman to rush her son into the hospital, then she’d, started wailing, as she run out with her son in her arms.  Then, the crowd had, dissipated, and someone from that gathering crowd called my father heartless, how he’d not helped the boy out, and there were the rumors of how my father’s looking into that boy’s eyelid, that’s delayed the time to save his life.

That evening, I’d asked my father, if shots can be administered into the heart?  My father, with a straight face, shook his head told me, “That’s from ignorance, out of a hurried case, currently, there’s only the epidermal, the injections into the blood vessels, there’s not yet any reports on the clinical researches of injections into the heart, maybe in the future, it might work, who knows, if the advances in medicines?”, my father took a deep exhale told me, “that child’s pupils were completely dilated, he’d already drowned and died, god can’t even save his life, I’d sent his mother to a major hospital, for the death to get confirmed, so the mother can accept that she’d, lost her own young.”

Up until now, whenever there are the news footages of medical negligence suits or the rescuers saving someone’s life, that chaos that happened back when in my house would come back to me, I can hear my father’s sighs of deep in my ears.  My father once told me, that being a physician, he’d wanted to save his patients from the trials of the illnesses, the swift recovery of the patients are a valid form of how the doctor was skillful enough, it also gives glory to the treating physicians.  The SARS outbreak from many years ago, and the current MERS-CoV, Taiwan could effectively keep the epidemic from spreading, it’s all due to the endless, the selfless giving of the medical staff members, they’re the ones who receive all the credits, it’d remembered my father’s physician friends who’d stated, “every time we see our patients leave the hospitals better than they came in, we feel very achieved.”  “Doctors are the most blessed profession, because we get to save our patients from the pains and trials of their physical conditions.”

And yet, in reality, most of the patients took getting their illnesses treated and cures as matter-of-fact, that if they don’t get cured, then it’s the doctors’ faults, that the doctors should be held responsible.  My father had once felt impacted, by how complex the conditions are, how the illnesses changed too quickly, that sometimes, the doctors can’t do anything, and to explain it to the families in a few words, was next to impossible, causing the beliefs to drift apart, that the patients’ families and the treating doctors are not on the same page on matters of treatment.  As a family member of a doctor, we all knew, that if our father wears that frown, fell silent more than usual, it’d meant, that one of his patients had, passed on, and we can feel, the trials of how my father is on call 24/7, along with how the doctors loved their patients like parents had their young.

I’m a firm believer of, how difficult it is to empathize with the illnesses in the patients, that only by understanding one another, getting along well as patients and doctors, working together, to help the patients get better is the only way.

And so, this is the hardest part of being a doctor, you can’t save them all, and yet, the members of the public believe that you are G-O-D, when you’re only M-A-N, and these doctors are already, doing the BEST they can, with what they’re being given, and they deserve some kudos, and they’d, rightfully EARNED a BREAK too!