Hospitals are a place where the sick go to heal, the terminally ill go to die, and the healthy go for check ups, shots, and to visit loved ones. The employees of the hospital have a line to walk. Procedure-oriented patient care or patient-oriented procedures (*Ross). They have to decide whether the procedures or the patients are more important. In my experience, a great number of physicians have lost track of the reason behind medical care and are focused on getting the paperwork done, following procedures, and getting in their hours. Visiting the emergency room more than the average person in the past couple years I got to experience how a lot of different doctors treat patients. Especially young ones with tattoos. They either treated you like a problem to solve, not a person to help. Or like a junkie trying to get a fix. What is going on in our society? I thought medicine was about helping people, about taking away pain, and figuring out a way to keep the healthy healthy and get the sick back to being healthy. It is a shame that the emergency room physicians see so many junkies that they can't differentiate between the truly ill and those out for a fix. We have such a messed up system and it's takes away from the patient-physician relationship. It makes physicians make bad calls because they're trying harder to save their asses than to make sure the patient is getting the proper care, proper tests done, and doing what they went to medical school to do someday. It is a hard line to walk... compassion and professionalism, but our society is making it more difficult than it needs to be.
*DEATH The Final Stage of Growth, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.
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