Traditionally medicine as a field of study (science or art, as you choose to see it) was something that was practiced by a select, if not elite group of people. Guys from the times of Hippocrates were taught by apprenticeship. They had a code of practice, and they were taught by and from the knowledge others before them had acquired. Those chosen to partake in the training to practice medicine were children of the wealthy, of other doctors, and other persons who excelled academically or otherwise, etc. It was an elite group acquiring a very specialized knowledge. Their superior knowledge and skills on which others from the village depended on placed them in greater standing in their communities. They were people to be respected, protected, renumerated, and admired for their service to the community. Such behaviour was totally understandable when it’s considered how many people in a village one physician was entrusted with caring for (often for a fee because these were rarely men of religion or charity).
Fast track to modern times and a lot of people still have the belief that doctors are special people. They believe they are smart, inherently “good”, of high moral standing, wealthy, caring, and just somehow different to other human beings. Now let me consider a few of these points. Actually, first let me consider what it means in modern times to be a functional human being. A man or woman living in modern times needs nutrition, shelter, psychosocial support (usually family and friends), industry, recreation, self-efficacy and satisfaction, and the money to be able to afford a lot of these things. Doctors are human beings too. Doctors also need these things. Doctors are human beings who are practitioners of a particular profession – but they are first and foremost human beings born of other human beings and of the same substance of every other human being on this planet.
I will start by discussing first the most banal of subjects, because it is a subject neither doctors or non-doctors like to associate to the profession: money. A doctor is a person whose job it is to deal with other human beings in order to improve their health or wellbeing. Note first that he is a human being doing a job. Jobs are done for money. A doctor needs money the same way everyone else needs money. You can’t walk into a supermarket and grab your groceries and tell the checkout personnel that you won’t be handing over money for your items because you are a doctor. No! It’s absurd. Money is demanded of doctors the same way and for the same things it is demanded of any other human being. What makes people uneasy about this discussion is no-one likes to think that a monetary value can be placed on preserving or improving the wellbeing of another person – but try doing it without it! How without money can you buy the equipment you need to exercise your profession, to feed and clothe yourself, and to enjoy the recreation all human beings are entitled to? A doctor provides a service, a product if you will, a specialized service; in return a fee is charged for this service. There is nothing abnormal about this. Teachers, engineers, shop assistants (not shop owners), prostitutes, psychologists, and even a lot of clerics, do it. Are they bad people for practising a human profession? No. They are workers employed to render a service for compensation. To deny that doctors don’t think about money and how to make it is like to deny that they eat and breathe and defecate just like any other person on this planet. Interestingly enough, unlike the nursing profession, medicine was never so inherently related to charity and religious servitude. A medical man was always separate to the concept of providing charity; he always provided a service for which material reward was often gifted/charged/expected.
The other common misconception is that doctors are somehow different, or better people, than others. Well, what kind of people go into the medical field these days? All kinds of persons. People of wealthy families, people of poorer families, people who are religious, people who are atheist, people who are accepting and welcoming, people who have prejudices, people with high academic scores, and people of not so high academic scores. At the end of your medical school training all these people are awarded (or earn) medical degrees. The prejudiced guy’s degree and that of the religious girl are both equal – and they both are now doctors. The medical schools teach you medicine, not how to be a “good” human being. Therefore, post-graduation the only thing in common of the graduands is their medical degree not their moral standing or wealth or religious views or any other societal variable. A person with a medical degree is still just that, a person. To say “doctors are special” is like saying “children like birds”. Some children like them, others hate them, some of them don’t even notice them, some wouldn’t even know a bird if one stood on its head. What am I trying to say? There are as many “good” doctors proportionately as there are “good” people in this Earth.
Lastly, I want to consider the concept of the ‘caring’ professions. One complaint patients sometimes make of doctors is that they don’t care. Now, remembering what I just discussed about how different sorts of people enter the medical profession, we have to consider that the reasons that people do go into medicine are also varied. For example, a person may go into medicine for some perceived social higher standing, because it is a profession in which continual education is inescapable, because they find biology and science fascinating, because they want to be of assistance to other human beings, because they enjoy certain technical aspects of surgery or procedural medicine, because they enjoy interacting with other human beings, because science and biology was something they were good at academically at school so they may as well use it in their work… the list is endless. Of course, most members of the non-medical community assume all doctors have gone into work in the medical field because they ‘want to help others’ or because they care about human beings to the devout (and also sacrificial) extent a religious minister might. These patients are often disappointed by the doctor who treats them as a client receiving a service (which they are) and not as a saint tending to his disciples’ every need. Medicine is a health care profession, not a ‘caring’ one that implies caring for things other than the person’s health. Your fees pay for a doctor to render a health care service, his specialized knowledge.
Of course, I am not saying all doctors are uncaring, money-hungry, immoral people who care only about themselves. No. Neither am I encouraging the general belief that doctors are superior, all-knowing, all-caring angels of God sent here to heal people of all their woes, health-related or otherwise. What I am saying is doctors are human beings. Human beings doing special jobs, but they are just human beings no more special than any of their patients.
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