Doctor Bully: The Bully in Medical Training

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

(CC) Medical Health/Flickr

“Bub! Bub! Dr. Bub!” His voice reverberated loudly across the crowded emergency room.

“Are you talking to me?” was my startled reply, with no prior intention of imitating Robert De Niro’s “Taxi Driver” character.

“Yeah, you, Bub!”

“You can either call me J or Dr. J,” I said in a measured tone to the doctor yelling at me from over 30 feet away. He was in charge of the emergency room when I was assigned there during my medical school ER rotation.

“Well, listen to him,” he said to everyone within earshot. “The medical student already thinks he’s a doctor!”

At that point, I walked out of the ER.

As far as I was concerned, he had crossed a line in what I considered appropriate behavior. Really, I’ve never been very good at just bending over and taking it, as one of the other medical students put it later when he was giving me his how-to-cope suggestions. (During that conversation, I told him, “You bend over and take it!”)

I got a call later that day from the director of emergency room services and was asked to report to his office. I knew I was in trouble, but what he said surprised me.

“J, the doctor who was in charge of the ER today gave you a failing grade for your ER rotation. You will have to repeat the rotation to graduate, but, as you are, I was a little older when I went to medical school, so I’m going to assign you to be in the ER when I am the one in charge there.” He said that in a kind and understanding tone.

That ER rotation turned out to be the best one I had of any assignment in medical school!

Of course, that physician who talked to me that way in the ER did not know that I already had a D.M.D. doctorate along with surgical experience and university rank and tenure at that point, and was in school to add an M.D. to my surgical credentials, but should that really matter? He was a bully, and at that moment, leaving the scene seemed a better course of action than any further escalation of the confrontation.

I tell this story because of a New York Times article I read recently titled “The Bullying Culture of Medical School.” In it, Pauline W. Chen, M.D., discuses the problem of bullying, and describes a scene where a medical student confronts her bullying attending physician, which resulted in a public screaming match between them.

Perhaps at that time in my life, I looked at medical school bullying as more of a military-type behavior, with a system of ranks from medical student through intern, resident and attending physician on to department chairman and dean. Each position has financial or career power over those “beneath” it.

From reading Dr. Chen’s article in the Times, I’m glad that the problem is receiving more recognition with the institution of some initiatives to address it, although their effectiveness has mixed reviews. In my surgical residency, there was no question that one of my senior residents was a bully. When I became a senior resident, all of us now at that level talked about the problem we had faced and committed to each other that we would put a stop to it with our group, and I feel we did. Whether the example we set was continued after us, I don’t really know, but I’m hoping things got better.

There are other examples of my being bullied in medical school, but not that many, and it would not be fair if I didn’t also mention that there were many examples of when people in several areas that I worked with went above and beyond to help me when they just as easily could have shown me my place in the medical hierarchy.

To those men and women, I say thank you! To those who were bullies, well, I’ve heard that living well is the best revenge.

I’ve addressed the problem of bullies in this column in the past, and if you follow the link you can find helpful information on that topic for children who are victims of bullying.

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Doctor Bully: The Bully in Medical Training is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/08/16/doctor-bully-the-bully-in-medical-training/

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