The old patients' bias against young doctors

 

 

 

While their concerns are justified in many cases, there remain some that arise simply because of them misunderstanding our generation.

 

Thank you for providing this platform for us to share our opinions and I will be elated for mine to be considered for publication. My submission is as follows.

 

Your Doctor is a millennial. 

 

There is a meme that goes like this. A patient is in the operating room. She is nervous; so she explains to the doctor, "This is my first surgery!" And the Doctor replies, "Mine too!" 

 

Let me begin then by empathizing with you when you find that your doctor is inexperienced. It's horrifying. You may sooner die from their intervention than from whatever ails you. However, it is a fact of life; that good old doctors retire and die and younger ones rise up to take their place.  

 

And that is how it has always been. At any given moment in the history of medicine, there have always been young doctors in hospitals. The ones of this age, however, are rather odd. They are unlike any other that came before them. They are millennials. Yes, that generation that most of you old folk like to be overly critical of.  

 

Who is a millennial though? Now since there is no real authority on the matter, we have been said to be people born anywhere between 1980 to 2000. And we are largely defined by coming of age during the internet explosion. But perhaps a better definition of Ugandan millennials would be abazzukulu, who are the people born after the current government took power.  

 

But, I digress. What is so special about your doctor born after 1986, and that came of age during the internet explosion? Well, for starters, they probably did all of their assignments in medical school on the internet. And if you find that already unsettling, then I hope you will eventually come to understand that a) you have no choice but make do with what you have and b) that we are actually not that bad after all. 

 

Many times I will be in a consultation room and a mother will tell me some obscure syrup she has been giving to her child. Or the child will have complaints, unlike anything I have heard of in my five months' experience. So I will pull out my phone and ask my consultant pediatrician on call, Dr. Google, and see what he makes of the child's problems. 

 

When some clients see me do this, and I bet they are fellow millennials, they think, wow, my doctor cares so much about me that he will crosscheck himself before he treats my child. Then a sad minority will whine, how incompetent. If I knew you were going to Google my symptoms, then I would have done that myself.  

 

Not so fast smarty pants. Can you tell the difference between costochondritis and myocardial ischemia, also known as a heart attack, when your child has severe chest pain? One is fatal while the other is benign. Also, children rarely have heart attacks. That's the difference five years of medical school and more makes. I can actually Google better than you. 

 

You have to understand that we millennials, or rather, bazukulu, have used this technology for so long and have become so good at doing so that we rely petty heavily on it. Can you imagine what the alternative would be? We would have to carry all of our reference books to the consultation room! And that would be practical, wouldn't it? So when we reach for our phones during a consultation, please trust that it's the better thing to do. 

 

Secondly, after being exposed to so much that we don't know and after medicine has become so complex that there are a lot of specialisms in it, we may even admit to you what we don't know about your illness. Which is something that almost got me into trouble one time during my internship.  

 

There was this patient with bloody diarrhea for several months and then severe abdominal pain. She had either one of two diseases. Both responded to the same medicine, but the surgical interventions in either one of them were different. Unfortunately, we couldn't perform the diagnostic procedure to determine exactly which one she suffered from until she was well enough to stand it.  

 

On several occasions when I went to see her, she asked, doctor, what exactly are you treating. And every time, I explained pretty much as I have done here. But she completely misunderstood me. Her conclusion, we didn't know what we were treating. We probably didn't even know whether the medicine would work! Maybe I should have feigned more certainty about her condition, but maybe she could have been more understanding. 

 

Gone are the days when doctors were gods, omnipotent and omniscient, even omnibenevolent. Now I would rather you made peace with the fact that doctors are human beings just like you than us bearing the entire burden of your health when we quite reasonably can't.  

 

That is why you should take charge of your own health. Even Google your symptoms before you come into consultation. But before you insist that I do an ECG for your chest pain, remember that this millennial doctor of yours has at least five years of medical training, and you have none!