My Way or the Highway

I started to look into some possible reasons and evidence for my convincing paper. In conducting my research, I found several articles that endorse George Engel’s biopsychosocial approach to patient interaction. In fact, I even found this handbook that gives guidelines for etiquette between doctors and patients. This handbook states that it is crucial for a physician to respect his patient, and display empathy for the patient’s situation. The physician must maintain eye contact with the patient as he narrates his personal account, and remain engaged in the conversation in order to establish a sense of trust. The physician must also give clear responses to the patient, using terms that can be understood by those unfamiliar with medical jargon.

After reading this article on etiquette, I started wondering why a physician WOULDN’T follow these guidelines. After all, empathy and treating others with respect seems like common sense to me, especially in a service profession. It almost made my argument seem too easy. My goal is to convince pre-medical students that extensive verbal communication is necessary for physicians to provide the most effective treatments for patients, but what convincing do I have to do if there are no opposing viewpoints?

So I sought to find articles on alternative approaches that doctors take while interacting with patients, and surprisingly found that this biopsychosocial model has not been historically used. I learned that some doctors assume a sense of autonomy, and although they interact with patients and listen to their stories, they are biased and carry a superiority complex. They already have an idea of the diagnosis, and are firmly entrenched in their idea. This stubbornness and show of professional power leads to misdiagnosis because the doctor is not really listening to the patient, but only pretending to. I wasn’t aware that these ideas were instilled within some doctors, and thought that medical training would make doctors more open to understanding the ethos of patients. Even if doctors do assume a superiority complex due to salary and years of schooling, the whole point of the healthcare profession is to serve others and put them first. On one hand, this tactic keeps doctors from becoming emotionally involved with their patients. However, they are far from being objective because they are too confident in their own judgments to listen to the situation from the patient’s viewpoint. I am trying to tie these points in somewhere in my convincing paper.