Maureen Dowd / Decoding the God complex
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Medical schools are starting to train doctors to be less intimidating to patients. And patients are starting to train themselves to be less intimidated by doctors.
We haven't completely gotten away from the syndrome so perfectly described by Alec Baldwin's arrogant surgeon in the movie "Malice":
"When someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn't miscarry or that their daughter doesn't bleed to death or that their mother doesn't suffer acute neural trauma from postoperative shock, who do you think they're praying to? ... You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God."
But there have been baby steps away from the Omniscient Doctor. The federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has begun a campaign to encourage patients to ask more pertinent questions and elicit more relevant answers.
"I used to think, 'He's a doctor. Who am I to ask a question?' " says Bill Lee, a Baltimore man who has suffered 10 heart attacks, in a video on the agency's website.
Patients have more options, a flood of Internet information and a bombardment of drug ads listing side effects -- and that can be terrifying. It adds to the general anxiety level that health insurance costs are rising sharply and that President Barack Obama's health care law seems headed toward the Supreme Court.
The "experts" are always issuing guidelines, which are soon contradicted by another set of "experts." It happened with the recommended age for regular mammograms, and it's happening with guidelines on hormone replacement for postmenopausal women.
First, estrogen was going to be the fountain of youth. Then hormone replacement therapy was going to spell doom, causing heart disease, stroke and breast cancer. And now, as The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, "some experts are reaching a more nuanced view of the risks and benefits and concluding that hormone therapy may still be a good option for healthy women in their 50s, depending on their symptoms, family history and worst fears."
Each patient, a Michigan gynecologist told The Journal, is like a Rubik's Cube, and must get an individual solution.
And that is the message of a new book, "Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You," by Jerome Groopman, an oncologist, and his wife, Pamela Hartzband, an endocrinologist, both members of the Harvard faculty and staff physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
First Published September 30, 2011 12:00 am
