{"id":2665,"date":"2010-06-18T13:36:22","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T12:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=2665"},"modified":"2010-08-27T13:23:02","modified_gmt":"2010-08-27T12:23:02","slug":"julian-sheather-why-am-i-frightened-of-doctors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2010\/06\/18\/julian-sheather-why-am-i-frightened-of-doctors\/","title":{"rendered":"Julian Sheather: Why am I frightened of doctors?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Reader I am not a shrinking violet, not a wuss or a whimp. When friends seek to describe me, pusillanimous is not the first adjective they choose. For all its many faults I have a mind and I tend to speak it. So why oh why am I still frightened of doctors? I just don’t get it. I am a doctor myself – of philosophy, granted – and I work with doctors day in and day out. Hell even some of my friends are doctors. But put me in a patient’s cap and wheel me before a medic and some traitor part of me will gibber and quake. It is not I should stress a fear of diagnosis, not a fear of bad news. It is a fear of doctors. A fear – oh how my liberal and enlightened heart resents the speaking of it – a fear of authority. A recent example. My son has long suffered from headaches and of late they have become more regular, at times waking him in the morning. I wanted him checked out. I wanted those formless subterranean dreads so familiar to parents slain by an MRI scan. Earlier the GP had said there was nothing to worry about. And here’s the thing – at the thought of going back and pushing for a scan I felt it again, I felt the fear. Not even the righteousness of parental love could armour me against it.<\/p>\n

So whence comes this lurking dread? Compounded from numerous sources no doubt, woven from many threads. Within me lurks still a trace of the old English habit of deference. Unlike in these more democratic and egalitarian times, authority was once distributed in hierarchies, dropping down through tiers like champagne in a glass fountain. At the risk of running a pen-nib along a raw English nerve, class is in play here. The halls of medicine still echo with the patrician tones of public school and Oxbridge. Riff-raff like me still feel the edge of condescension in tones bred to rule.<\/p>\n

The question of authority is clearly a vexed one in these democratic days. In this brave new world fear should have no place. Habits of deference should have been replaced by a respect for technical expertise, a relationship of condescension and gratitude replaced by a contract between equals. Knowledge is power, yes, and if there were no inequality of expertise we would all be doctor to ourselves – and lawyer and accountant – but those old traces of feudal fear should have had their day.<\/p>\n

And yet intriguingly I quake much less before members of the other professions. I am by and large immune to the swagger and self-assertion of bankers. Lawyers, accountants, MPs – more often than not I see the paper in the tiger. So what is it about doctors alone that provokes such faintness of heart?<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is the nature of the knowledge, of medical knowledge. It is unavoidably intimate. The medical gaze is a gaze that looks within. The curtain to the self’s inner citadel is lifted. Perhaps we fear something god-like in that omniscient eye?<\/p>\n

Whatever may be the answer to this little riddle, there is one small observation I would make that doctors might find useful. I’ve been a patient on a number of occasions, played patient in a fair few consultations. And in my experience immeasurably better are the ones where the doctor puts me at my ease, where a fear of authority is replaced by respect for therapeutic skill. Not always easy to achieve perhaps, us patients come in so many shapes and sizes, but better – and so very much more likely to lead to a happy outcome – are the ones where I feel like a partner in the deal, and not the beneficiary of impersonal medical largesse.<\/p>\n

Julian Sheather<\/strong> is ethics manager, BMA. The views he expresses in his blog posts are entirely his own.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reader I am not a shrinking violet, not a wuss or a whimp. When friends seek to describe me, pusillanimous is not the first adjective they choose. For all its many faults I have a mind and I tend to speak it. So why oh why am I still frightened of doctors? […]<\/p>\n

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