It is not easy for anyone to become ill and be at the mercy of doctors, but what about doctors themselves? How do they react to being on the other side of stethoscope? In When Doctors Become Patients Robert Klitzman, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, looks at what the experience is like for doctors who become sick, and what it can teach us about our current health care system and more broadly, the experience of being ill. In the excerpt below Klitzman explores how doctors go about researching their own diseases and how this research seems more disheartening once they have become part of the statistics.
‘‘We know very little,’’ Roxanne, the gastroenterologist, said, referring to the medical literature on the causes of cancer. As suggested above, once ill, many of these physicians came to reassess the role of research in individual medical decisions, and became more critical in their evaluations of research as a whole. Roxanne, for example, became more sensitive to the elusiveness of ‘‘the truth,’’ no longer thinking there was just one answer. ‘‘People base things on the literature and on one paper that’s not been duplicated. I’m skeptical. There’s a lot of literature, but also fashions—things used in the past. Now we’re into other treatment approaches. We can’t cure anything.’’ Indeed, these ill physicians appeared previously to have paid little heed to the implications of this pattern. (more…)