Here’s Who This Doc is Loyal To

         God and family are at the top of the list of course, but today I am talking about loyalty as a doctor.  Who is the doctor loyal to?

        This will be a very short post, because it is a very short answer: it is the patient. 

        For the most part, I am what I seem; a simple country doctor who plays the mandolin and whose idea of a big night on the town is to take his wife to a bluegrass show.  There have only been a few people I went to war with over the years. 

        It was over the same issue every time.  If anyone stepped on the rights of my patient, I became a beast.  If they were rude or disrespectful to them, it made no difference to me who they were, I found a politically correct way to insure they wound up out of the loop.  I have worked with the same nurses for twenty-five years, and they would be the first to tell you not to step in between me and my patient any more than you’d crawl into a bear’s den and tell a grizzly how to raise her young’un.  

      My patients are my boss.  I live to serve them.  When I read doctor books, it is with them in mind.  To an outsider, the intensity of these relationships is near impossible to understand. 

        The reason I play the mandolin is so I won’t burn up inside.   My advice to people who want to understand my mind on this is to go the medical school and spent a hundred hours a week for a decade to come to grips with some small fraction of the complexity of the human doctor/patient relationship, and stick with it a few decades until you understand how little you still know.  Then we can talk about it.  Otherwise, I would advise people to not get in between me and my patient.

Dr. B

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