Doctors Are People Too

In case anyone wondered, physicians are actual people. We are subject to the usual foibles of humanity – pride, selfishness, impatience, anxiety, fatigue, and our own personal biases to name a few. Hopefully these tendencies are mitigated by professional standards, a desire to help people, and the pursuit of objective evidence.

There was a time in my career when I was working far too hard. I was perpetually exhausted and it wasn’t unusual for me to walk into a room to examine a child and have the mother say “Dr. Sauder, are you OK?” One night I was making hospital rounds after a long day in the office and the grandmother of one of my patients said to me, “Dr. Sauder, you look like you could use a hug.” We must have been an odd sight; an older African American woman and a younger (at the time) white doctor embracing on the pediatric ward late at night. I am sure she never realized how much that buoyed my spirits.

Doctors, being human, make mistakes. Interestingly, I have found that people have often been more forgiving of my actual mistakes than my perceived mistakes. And as with most things in life, circumstances are often not exactly as they appear on the surface. There have been times that I have heard things in public about physicians or events that I knew weren’t true but I could not correct them because I would have needed to compromise a patient’s confidentiality to do so.

Clearly the days of regarding a doctor’s word as gospel truth are long gone, as they should be. We have years of training and experience in our chosen field and are dedicated to doing the best we can for our patients. But we are also human. And it is important for us and for our patients to remember that.