Changing the Medical Conversation

Dealing with Covid-19 has been a stress on medical providers.  Retirees like me are dormant, and maybe even regret not being in the fray.  It has changed the conversation of medicine for the better, though.  We'll start with Provider.  The Flexner Report, not yet fully of Blessed Memory, purged practitioners of lesser training and instituted licensing and credentialing.  Physicians often resent parity with other practitioners for understandable reasons.  But with stresses on caring for high volumes of sick patients, a willingness to work and threshold of skill rises in importance.  Doctors get the most attention but good medical care also depends on nurses, technicians, housekeepers with their disinfectants and secretaries to direct patients to the right place and assure their appointments.  They are at personal risk and often have young families.  In a crisis we are all providers with a much flattened hierarchy.

As a reader of social media, medical and otherwise, the conversation in the charting rooms and doctors' lounges no longer focuses on the devaluation of physicians.  Those reviled dysfunctional EHR's have not gone away.  Eventually somebody will get back to our metrics and RBVU's.  But for now we are focused on good outcomes for patients.  Not just the doctors but the managers.  We are all rowing our canoes in the right direction.  Professional antagonism, even animosity sometimes, no longer appears in the physician restricted or public postings.  As we watch TV, we wish there was a Gong to get the President off the podium so we can hear from the learned doctor instead.  People have better priorities from this health stressor, both in public and in private.

Like most calamities other than the extinction of the dinosaurs, Covid-19 will one day pass from the forefront to fond anecdotes and ultimately to the history books.  It remains to be determined if the professional nobility of thought and expression will remain.  But for now we can admire those doing their best to mitigate our crisis and take comfort in knowing that our loftiest doctors can rise in stature above all others.