Earlier this month, I gave a presentation to about 65 residents and other doctors at the Queens Hospital Center in Jamaica, New York. The topic? “Roles in Patient-Doctor Relationships: Seeing Both Sides”
Over the next several posts, various aspects of that talk will be highlighted:
Doctors’ Roles and Responsibilities (including doctor morale)
Patients’ Roles and Responsibilities (and what doctors wish patients knew)
Stages of Patient Frustration and Satisfaction
Doctor Actions Improving Patient Relationships
Patient Actions Improving Doctor Relationships
We’re Not There Yet on Doctor-Patient Relationships
Doctors typically have the roles and responsibilities highlighted in this image. How do YOU rate each of your doctors across these roles and responsibilities?
As patients, it is also vital for us to understand the factors that may affect our doctors’ performance. This video shows a few such factors.
Today, we ask: Do you think your doctors are caring?
As part of a research project, Mark E. Quirk, et al., devised the following checklist. How would EACH of your doctors score on the checklist? If a doctor’s score is low, why don’t you switch to another physician?
“About 610,000 people die of heart disease in the United States every year –that’s 1 in every 4 deaths.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women. More than half of the deaths due to heart disease in 2009 were in men.
Coronary heart disease(CHD) is the most common type of heart disease, killing over 370,000 people annually.
Every year about 735,000 Americans have aheart attack. Of these, 525,000 are a first heart attack and 210,000 happen in people who have already had a heart attack.”
Here is an excellent video that encourages you to do proper testing. 🙂
Today, let’s look at the observations of a Crohn’s disease survivor. As Tessa Miller writes for the NY Times:
“Finding out you have a chronic illness — one that will, by definition, never go away — changes things, both for you and those you love. When I was diagnosed, I didn’t know how much my life would change. There’s no conversation about that foggy space between the common cold and terminal cancer, where illness won’t go away but won’t kill you, so none of us know what ‘chronic illness’ means until we’re thrown into being sick forever.”
“Chronic illness patients not only face painful physical symptoms, but also mental ones that linger even when the disease is well controlled. A therapist should be considered a crucial part of your care team, just as important as a gastroenterologist or cardiologist.”
“Your relationship with yourself changes. You grieve a version of yourself that doesn’t exist anymore, and a future version that looks different than you’d planned. You might have to give up career goals, hobbies and family plans, learning a ‘new normal’ in their place.”
“Chronically ill people research their diseases ad nauseam. They try more treatments than they can count. In many cases, great scientific minds can’t crack a cause or cure. So unless someone asks for your advice, don’t offer it.”
“There’s a sense of shame that comes with chronic illness that pressures patients into secrecy, making them feel likethey can’t discuss their diseaseoutside of the doctor’s office. Secrecy bolsters the lack of public conversation and knowledge, which feeds the shame patients feel.”
“Living with chronic illness makes every day a little harder, but it also makes every day a little sweeter. Though I don’t know what my future holds, I’m overwhelmed with a gratitude I didn’t have before my diagnosis — some days I marvel at just being alive.”
As we well know, fame and fortune do not ensure our health. For most of us though, we usually don’t have the world able to read about our maladies through social media.
For example, just in the last few days, we learned that Beverly Hills 90210‘s Luke Perry died after a massive stroke. The family of baseball Hall of Famer Tom Seaver announced that he was suffering from dementia. And Jeopardy host Alex Trebek revealed that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
In the case of Trebek, he shared his cancer status himself through Twitter and YouTube. He offered a message of hope in the face of his dire diagnosis. His YouTube video has been viewed several million times
As a PC survivor, I especially appreciate Trebek’s open, honest, and upbeat message.
As we might expect, a number of these jobs are in the health care field. Here are these jobs with their job title, median base salary, and level of job satisfaction (out of 5):
#2 — Nursing Manager; $83,000; 4/5
#4 — Occupational Therapist; $74,000; 4/5
#12 — Physician Assistant; $105,000; 3.7/5
#19 — Speech Language Pathologist; $72,000; 3.7/5
#30 — Dental Hygienist; $67,250; 4.5/5
#32 — Nurse Practitioner; $102,000; 3.5/5
#37 — Physical Therapist; $70,000; 3.6/5
#41 — Radiologic Technologist; $48,000; 4/5
Click the image to learn more. And to see numerous current job listings by job title.
