I have mixed feelings about this subject.
What I like about it is that someone with means identified a problem within the healthcare system that had a negative effect on outcomes for patients. Then, many years later decided to actually do something about it - and did so by donating $42 million to the University of Chicago.
What I don't like about it is that the $42 million donation is aimed specifically to improve bedside manner, compassion and kindness.
Does that surprise you? After all, I've written many times about arrogant and condescending doctors and their negative effect on us patients. I've given many of you a place to share your own experiences with arrogant doctors, and to even make suggestions about improving bedside manner. You might think, then, that I would be supportive of this initiative to improve the demeanor with which doctors deliver their medical services, right?
The donors are Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Bucksbaum. Based on a horrible experience Carolyn Bucksbaum had many years ago when her doctor dismissed her intuition about her medical condition, and a second and ongoing experience over the next many years when she worked with Dr. Mark Siegler at the University of Chicago Medical Center, Mrs. Bucksbaum decided to do something to be sure other patients, in the future, would not have to put up with any more arrogance from medical providers.
And to those points, I say "Hooray! Thank you!", and, "I hope the lessons you impart can spread to every other medical student and doctor who can possibly benefit from what you will teach them!" Further, I hope those lessons will be taught (and perhaps pounded into) those doctors practicing today who have already gone off the arrogance charts - those who are, unfortunately, teaching today's medical students how to behave tomorrow.
But yes, there is a downside, and that is, that such a topic needs an expensive, $42 million institute at all. If doctors would simply approach their work using a combination of the Golden Rule, and the manners their mothers taught them, and regard their patients with the dignity and respect their patients deserve, then those $42 million could be put to a much loftier use - toward finding a cure toward a debilitating disease, or improving infant mortality, or helping indigent patients get some of the care they need.
So yes - as a patient, I truly do appreciate the gift the Bucksbaum's have bestowed and I do hope the ripple effect will spread far and wide. I hope someday that a doctor who might have been arrogant and condescending will, instead, treat me respectfully.
But as a human being I am dismayed that our culture has grown so intolerant and disrespectful that such a huge gift is required to begin setting us back on course. And I mourn those individuals who are truly sick who might have been helped or cured as a result of the Bucksbaum's donation if those arrogant doctors didn't have to be set back on the right course to begin with.
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Agree? Disagree?
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