There is a narrative that exists in our society in which the healthcare field has been overtaken with caricatures of good and evil. Hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurers, and physicians are cast as greedy villains, who care little or not at all about the well-being of the patient, but thoughtlessly follow charts and doctrines of Western medicine and then go home to swim in piles of golden coins like Scrooge McDuck.
While I would admit that there are some greedy folks in the healthcare field (just as in every other field) and that there is room for improvement in the treatment of patients, I also believe that there are very few true villains in this life, both in the healthcare field or in any other. In fact, I even believe there are heroes who are doctors, hospital administrators, pharmaceutical researchers, and many other healthcare-related positions.
The problem is, we often don’t hear their stories of victory, partly because patient privacy is of paramount importance, and partly because they simply tend to be humble folks. But I happen to be married to a doctor, and sometimes I find myself compelled to share a story that flies in the face of the more negative perspective that seems so pervasive.
One such story is this one.
A woman was in the hospital due to breathing complications stemming from a problem in her lungs. The situation was quite grave—her doctors had warned her that while she needed the assistance of a ventilator to breathe during this moment of acute lung malfunction, they could not guarantee she would be able to come off the ventilator afterward. Happily, a while later she was able to move from the ventilator to a tracheotomy, but dealing with the stress of the situation had taken a toll on her mentally, physically, and emotionally.
Being unsure of her future ability or inability to breathe on her own had left her feeling anxious, afraid, and weak. Upon entering her hospital room very early one morning while rounding, Jeffrey found her sitting up in bed, struggling for air and looking terrified. He came over to her bed and watched as she wrote on her whiteboard (as patients who are trached cannot speak) “I can’t breathe. I know you can’t give me any more medicine right now, but I can’t breathe.”
Jeffrey rightly diagnosed that the patient’s feeling of breathlessness was related to her anxiety rather than her lungs, however he also knew that giving her more medicine to treat the anxiety was not an option as it might depress her breathing even more. (The patient knew this, too—that is why she stated “I know you can’t give me more medicine”.) So what’s a doctor to do who is denied his ability to prescribe?
He motioned for her to hand him the dry erase marker. Quietly he drew a series of lines and then handed the marker back to her so she could make her first guess in their impromptu game of hangman.
Quietly there, in the early morning hours under harsh fluorescent hospital light, the room became calm and the patient’s breathing slowed, not by medical intervention per se, but by her doctor, sitting on the foot of her bed for a while to play a silly game. Sometimes medicine means pills and prescriptions, and other times medicine means distractions and kindness and time.
Don’t let the narratives you hear fool you. Our healthcare system is not made of one dimensional caricatures. There are exceedingly few villains and while there are occasionally heroes, more often good medicine is simply good work done by attentive doctors (nurses/administrators/lab techs/etc...), responsive and resilient patients, and the miraculous biological process of healing.
Yes, your doctor really does care about you and your health—and if you’re lucky, he might even care to play you in hangman.
