Opinion
Let us treat you, doctor!
We should have a separate well-defined management science for doctors. One which will mentor them and teach them: how to manage themselves. How to manage their interactions and behaviour toward patients and society? And how to deal with the community around them
BY Mohammad Mutaher Zerger
And that management science should have well-defined guidelines to teach our society as well. Our society needs awareness at different levels. How to behave with the doctors – the healers of humankind? How to treat them in day-to-day life. And how to manage them and make their social life better for them? They are the healers of our society. Round the clock, they do a great job of healing every wound and pain of our society. Let the society come together and help the doctors and offer them, even, a healing medium. To perform their job flawlessly, they need a conducive environment.
Let us look at it through two different dimensions: one glancing through and being in the shoes of a doctor and walking in the society they live or be part of, and another staying in the shoes of the society and visualising our day-to-day interactions with our doctors.
A Doctor from age 20 onwards sees pain around him. His day-to-day life starts with people and episodes which have intrinsic pain, and he is taught how to treat this pain of others. How to take this pain out of the situation? Managing pain and minimising the pain of others becomes the primary day-to-day activity of the doctor. How much pain he manages, how much pain of others he relieves, how much pain he deals with becomes a benchmark of his performance. One which measures his performance development index, on which his career growth depends. Others pain becomes the means of his livelihood and growth. He becomes a merchant who sells his skills to deal with the pain, and in the process, the pain of others becomes his associate. One he has willingly or unwillingly got married to since the time he plans to do his MBBS. So pain is rendered a toy in the hands of a doctor. He lacks the emotional feeling towards that pain. The pain of others no longer provides a stimulus to his endorphins, and they do not respond to the pain of others in a manner other members of society do.
Here we have an individual who, if we see from the perspective of society, is the one who behaves entirely different than another person of that society. Death, disease, pain is just another process to him; these things usually rattle other beings of the same society. One will tend to observe these individuals totally unresponsive towards the emotional outburst of their patients. They are on track and want their patients to be on that one straight track, to be exact and to the point. While on the other end, the patient, who is in pain, wants the doctor to be responsive to his pain on the same emotional intensity, as will the other members of the same society. Both these individuals forget the perspective of others. The process leads to noise, either of the nature of distrust or discomfort.
So, here we need our scientists, thinkers and educationist to step in and make some chapters of management science that will primarily teach our healer how to manage a patient. How to gauge the intensity of pain of his patient? And how to give it the due respect/ response it deserves. We need to take our healers through a regular process and make them balance their world full of pain and the society scared of pain. We need to teach them the intensity of responses they should give to the pain of others, and at the same time, treat this pain.
On the other end, when the doctor is out of his doctor’s chair and wants to immerse in society as another social being, society knowingly or unknowingly does not allow him to be one. We often treat him as a healer, even when he is in a different role in society. When he simply wants to relax and relieve himself from stress. We are ready with a number of complaints or episodes, which have to deal with his job rather than self. We are eager to seek his consultation for our various conditions, even if he is in the middle of dinner. Otherwise ready with the complaints that he did not attend to our calls the other day (by the way, that time he was in the middle of major surgery). In the process, we render him a being, which of course is elite but not a social being, which he sometimes or more often wants to be.
Here, our educationists and reformists need to devise some chapters, which will deal with this. That will teach our society how our healers should be responsible when on the healers’ chair. And how they need to be treated when they are off that chair.
Well, I strongly feel this branch of management needs to be devised and devised very soon. At least a beginning towards a continuous process for seeing the interaction between the society and healer reach a level, which will put both of them at comfortable places. A healer, knowing he is a part of the society and a similar social being as are others and a patient feels his healer has touched him with similar levels of the emotional quotient as he wants him to touch him with. To society, these lessons can be incorporated at different levels, at a school level, at the college level and even at a career level. And to a doctor, these teachings can be an integral subject (both theory and practical) of his professional course. One, he has to pass with good grades like he has to pass anatomy or biochemistry.
P.S: Very recently, for having an inner view for this article, I spent a day with one of my close doctor friends; in his OPD, ICU, emergency and in-patient ward and this one day, just one day only, made me visit a psychologist for the socio-psychology effects it had on me.
A corporate who’s who and renowned business consultant, the author has worked at top positions of a number of MNCs, including McDonald’s, Microsoft, Mumbai Airport, Zomato, LensKart, Yateem Group of GCC