Due to increasing pressures in real life, I've taken to lurking
more often than posting of late, but I have been following the
recent threads with interest.
re: the argument that you are a "better" doctor if you have had
children.
I would not argue that you are necessarily a *better* doctor
after children, but I would argue strongly that you are a very
*different* doctor. To deny that sharing an experience with
you patients affects nothing is the worst sort of politically
correct nonsense. It assumes that we are all the same,
irrespective of our upbringing, education, experience and
personality. Complete nonsense.
Without the personal experience of an ill, feverish child who
will not open their mouth for a spoonful of paracetamol, who
wriggles and squirms and spits it out when you've managed to
get .2ml into their mouth, you are (IMNSVHO) going to react in
quite a different way to the parent who says "Oh, little
Johnny will only take Calpol". If, of course, you have three
children who will swallow any old medicine with a smile, then
you are going to have another type of reaction again. The point
being that a shared experience *changes* your outlook. Whether
it changes it for the good or the worse is not the point.
People say, flippantly, "so you're saying that you have to have
cancer to work in oncology?" What a fscking specious statement.
Would you deny that someone who has lived with cancer and its
treatment would not practise oncology in different way?
On balance, I would argue that a physician who has shared an
experience with a patient would, on a range of scales, be
"better" at managing that patient.
Of course, there are trite counterarguments. Just because I've
had a cold, doesn't mean I'm better at managing colds than someone
who has never had a cold. There must be physicians who, when
faced with a patient who shares their medical complaint, launches
into a long tale of their own woes.
I can think of dozens of ways in which my management of children,
their illnesses, and their parents has changed since I had children.
I think I am more understanding, more supportive, and certainly
much less dismissive of a range of symptoms and problems. I accept
that I might be less "objective" but there exist arguments that
"objectivity" is not the be all and end all of paediatrics.
--
Dr Iain L M Hotchkies / http://www.hotch.demon.co.uk (unpublished
novels and lots of other fun stuff, but very little hard-core porn)
"My experience has been from working in the UK that GPs will screw each
other but will be fairly supine when fighting with the Government or
charging the patients proper fees when they are due."
(Dr Sachit Shah, as posted on GP-UK 12th February 1998)
"Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes, there
is something in them that is not disagreeable to him." (Samuel Johnson)
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