“Dear Judy, Please tell your readers — especially the medical professionals among them — that you don’t necessarily lose your IQ when you lose your health,” a reader writes.
I know just what this man means. The carelessness and rudeness of medical staff these days, especially in hospitals, is impossible to ignore. Patients, as this letter-writer also complains, are often referred to in the third person: as in — when other staff is present — “He has yet another tumor along his spine.” Or (I love this one, which I overheard in a hospice!): “He claims to experience severe pain.”
Why such remoteness, such seemingly unfeeling assessments from medical personnel when the patient is present, afraid, suffering – and listening to every syllable?
Well partly, I like to think, because sometimes medical personnel are themselves afraid: afraid of their own mortality, and of course afraid they too will one day be sick and suffering. Partly also because often the dying do suffer mental and emotional impairment: especially those among them who are old, or whom bad illness has robbed of strength and memory. Among those over 85, for instance, almost 50 percent will suffer from Alzheimer’s.
In other words there are times when doctors and nurses assume — correctly — that a patient will not understand what they are saying. Or at least not everything they are saying.
But obviously this isn’t always the case. So yes, I think the letter-writer is onto something vital: Being diagnosed as terminal doesn’t mean you’re brain-dead. Illness is humiliating enough as an experience: nightgowns that fall open in the back, food that is unpalatable, pain and nausea that induce in previously competent adults infantile dependencies.
All these are bad enough. They shouldn’t be compounded by thoughtlessness from the medical staff .
I am sorry once again to see that your website is being used as a guided missile against my former colleagues. Doctors have a hard enough time not collapsing under the burden of work and trying to avoid mistakes. Holding them to a higher standard of manners than any other profession is counterproductive. Do not judge us by Miss Congeniality standards.
I’m so thrilled someone has come out publicly with the way patients are treated! Both my parents had medical humiliation added to their pain, both suffered terribly. Because they were both so totally dependent on the goodwill of doctors and nurses, they avoided all confrontation. Neither of my parents (none of us, their grown children either!!) dared say a word against the awful way older people and sick people were treated in the hospital. In any other profession, that kind of attitude which would get you fired! I know how hard doctors and nurses and doctors’ assistants work., but there’s no excuse for treating the sick and the elderly as though they are either invisible or a piece of meat.