The Sociopathic Doctor

The problem with the medical system is the lack of empathy that doctors believe they are required to possess. The irony us that they were correct, a long time ago.

In the past the chances of a patient surviving were very low, so doctors adopted this emotional wall between them and the patients they will likely see alive only a couple times, then attend their funeral soon after. This kept them saner, force sociopathic tendencies are inherently not sane but losing too many people you care for can cause more severe psychological problems.

The result was workable, at the time, allowing medical professionals to continue to work to the best of their ability and ultimately heal more than harm. However, times are changing, as they always do, and like many old methods this has become obsolete to the point of causing more harm than benefits.

Today it is quite common for patients and doctors to share death beds, not literally, but in the same hospital room even. This is thanks to our medical sciences advances far beyond what we had ever dreamed possible, allowing humans to live 120 years now.

However this emotional divide allows doctors to become relaxed, even clumsily so, in their treatment of patients. The forced sociopathic tendencies also result in doctors becoming actual sociopaths quite often. We see this effect in many cases, doctors misdiagnosing patients to move them through the system as quickly as possible resulting in the patients' deaths soon after or long term complications to a procedure that should have been routine.

The doctors who save the lives of patients are the ones the patients associate outside of the office more often than not. They are the doctors who are invested in caring for said patients. These are the doctors of celebrities and the super rich, but not anyone else. So why the difference?

The wealthy patients are their bread and butter, they pay the most, and medical care is all about the profit. Greed is the driving force to encourage the doctors to break down that emotional wall and draw close to their patients, for it is easier to understand someone you know as well as yourself.

The key to a successful diagnosis is just that, understanding what the patient describes. A patient with a huge cultural difference will be difficult to understand, their adjective usage will seem alien to the doctor, resulting in poor diagnosis. This also often leads to the patient being declared incompetent even if said patient understands the problems better than the doctor.

To over come cultural boundaries, and other such problems, the doctor must become friends and form an attachment to the patient, the sociopathic wall must be taken down. Once invested in the patients' well being emotionally, the doctor is able to understand complaints better and pinpoint problems that are often missed in any mechanical examination.

This attachment offers further benefits in that the doctor is also more likely to understand the emotional state of the patient and know how it plays into their complaints. Emotions play a huge role in how we perceive things, my doctor recently discovered lumps in the area of my colon and all I can think about is "what if it's cancer?"

Because of this I am likely to forget to mention many other sensations associated with this problem, resulting in a missed diagnosis. A doctor who knows me well would know how afraid of surgery I am as well as how extremely high my pain tolerance is and prod for more information, while others will assume I have offered all the pertinent information.

This could be the difference between life and death, undiagnosed problems in the colon do kill patients quite often, even though a false positive for cancer can also be beneficial. So I have to figure out, on my own, what information is valid and what belongs to the other problem that has been ignored by doctors for a long time. The result is that I am under extremely high amounts of stress now.

This is a common result as well, patients go through a lot of anxiety when faced with a stranger for a doctor, even if they have seen this face several times before. This is not without a price, doctors will have to learn to govern their emotions like everyone else, not allowing one's anger or disgust get in the way of their activities.

Doctors will have to learn to avoid becoming violent when angry, like everyone else, and how to actually cope with loss and disappointment. The costs may seem high, but the rest of us have learned to do this, we can help doctors experience emotional attachments in a healthy way as well.