Hubris, thy name is often physician

Commentary. By Eric Anderson, MD, AMNews contributor. May 14, 2001.

COMMENTARY

Observations on the state of medical practice and medical life

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A medical school friend once told me how -- despite socialized medicine -- he'd developed an upscale private practice in an English city.

"Mystique is important if you want to attract wealthy patients to your fold," he said. "When I do a house call for my patients, I call it 'prescribing the doctor.' Patients open the door, see my face and they know their troubles are over. I am their medicine!"

Mmm.

He'd been called to the first high- rise condominium built in his city. He took the elevator, rang the penthouse doorbell and smiled confidently at the worried mother. Their little boy had developed a high fever. He stepped in and asked for the child to be brought into the living room where he could examine the child in a better light -- but really, he confided to me, so he could gain the psychological drama of having the sick child brought into his august presence like a biblical supplicant. A lop-sided, embarrassed grin grew on his face as he continued his story.

"While waiting for the parents to waken the child and bring him in," he said, "I sauntered over to the plate-glass window that ran full height from ceiling to floor and glanced down. And smacked into the floor in my first-ever attack of vertigo. I was crouched on all fours, vomiting on their antique Persian carpet, when they came back with the child, the one I was going to save."

Hubris, believing we are favored by the gods, is not a rare bird amongst physicians. We find it in newly qualified doctors who walk down the street desperate to stop passersby and say, "We can remove that horrible thing on the end of your nose!" And we find it in older physicians who know they can talk patients out of congestive failure even before the medications work, merely by chatting calmly. [...]