Skip to main content

My Dose of a "Desperate Housewife" Bashing!


As timely as the “Desperate Housewives” issue, my competence as a physician was put to question recently. Since it was the first incident in my 7 years of medical practice, I didn’t know how to react. It was a mix of anger, disappointment and resentment. It took me some time to get over it and regain my confidence back.

The doctor-patient relationship is considered to be essential in the practice of medicine. The physician and patient are supposedly in a partnership and both parties should openly discuss the management and ask questions in a trusting manner. This ideology stems from trying to maintain the most objective outlook by both parties – patient and doctor – in formulating and exercising optimal treatment plans. In fact, many health care professionals and patients claim that this trust and relationship is therapeutic in its own right. Unfortunately, this relationship was breached by my patient. Despite the explanations and clarifications I made at the start of treatment, she did not immediately discuss her doubts regarding this to me. Instead, she opted to seek opinion from ‘other’ physicians and other people who apparently said my management was wrong. I resent that she never mentioned anything, considering that I followed up on her a day after we started medications and even had contact with her close relative a week after. Then they confronted me three months after! I think it was unfair on my side of the relationship.

Since I did not have anything to be afraid of and I had basis for my management, as courtesy, I still sent them my explanation and some reference materials. I took responsibility and apologized for whatever is lacking in my pre-management explanations to them. They haven’t responded until now.

Competence is defined as ``the ability to perform the roles and tasks required by one's job to the expected standard''. In my case, the treatment I gave was according to what the medical books and journals say, and what worked with previous patients I saw with similar illness. In my opinion, my judgment was within the ‘medical standards’ and therefore, to question it was tantamount to questioning my competence as well.

The experience is painful but I would rather think of it as a constructive criticism. I am not a ‘perfect’ doctor and since I am committed to reaching a goal to be the best I can be in my profession, I will accept these doses of harassments and insults. After all, I was called to be a doctor and have full confidence in the One who called me!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Abdominal Epilepsy?

The other day, I encountered an uncommon medical diagnosis, abdominal epilepsy. Maybe I was absent when this was taught in med school or maybe it was mentioned but it just didn't register in my memory bank. Anyway, for those colleagues who haven't heard of this as well, here's what I found out about it, so that next time you are faced with a weird abdominal pain, you will think of abdominal epilepsy as a differential. There are many medical causes of abdominal pain; abdominal epilepsy is one of the rare causes. From a medical perspective, the term epilepsy refers not to a single disease, but to a group of symptoms with numerous causes. The common factor in all forms of epilepsy is an excessive electrical excitability of the brain. The increased excitation is called a seizure and may manifest as a partial or total loss of consciousness and muscle spasms or other involuntary movements. Many conditions can produce epilepsy. For example, a genetic predisposition is...

"Ganacity"

If there's one word that I will never forget from my AGSB experience, it's "ganacity"! A word frequently mentioned by our FinMan professor. What does it mean? It's a combination of the tagalog word "gana" (appetite, zest) and the english suffix "city" which converts an adjective word into a noun. 'Ganacity' therefore refers to one's state of desire or interest in something. I am sharing this because I feel that my 'ganacity' for what I am doing now is spiralling down, and it is so difficult to reverse it back up or just to keep it at a maintained level. It is becoming a struggle on a day to day basis. I am hoping that night and day will alternate fast so that this battle will end soon.

Growths and Tumors of the Mouth

A colleague in the practice of dental medicine referred to me a 40-year old female with a large pinkish, cauliflower-like mass on her lower right buccal gingival. It apparently started 2 months prior to the consult as a small pinkish pedunculated mass, nontender, that was often irritated during teeth brushing. She wanted it removed. Without biopsy, the characteristic of the mass is more consistent with squamous papilloma. I scheduled her for excision biopsy under local anesthesia. More and more people are experiencing some ‘growths’ in their oral cavity. I think this is mainly related to the lifestyle we have adapted these years. Smoking, eating food with irritants or preservatives etc. are the usual culprits. For information, these are the more common growths and tumors that we usually see in the oral cavity. Please be guided and consult your dentists if you notice something similar in your mouth. Abscess This is a soft, pus containing swelling. Th...