In IT, all the worst patients are doctors.
Hopefully no actual doctors answer this question though 🙂
My first job out of college was in a hospital. When you see doctors outside of their own setting, you quickly realize that >90% of them are pretty stupid at literally everything else. I was an accountant processing travel reimbursements for business-related professional expenses (mostly vacations disguised as conferences and workshops for CMEs) and many of them just could NOT understand why they weren’t allowed to claim alcohol on their travel reimbursements. Literally, the IRS will not allow it. And even if it did, state law forbids it, too. Sometimes, I got angry emails because they couldn’t claim miles for taking a detour to visit a relative before going to their destination after I adjusted it as if they drove directly from work to the airport. Shit like that. I was good friends with the IT guy there and he had many similar gripes. Most of his job was arriving on-site to plug machines in because they swore up and down on the phone that the machine was plugged in.
I’m convinced the majority of doctors are just average intelligence people who spent a decade practicing and mastering a skill. That’s it. Anyone can be a doctor if they can be allowed into med school and sink the time and effort into becoming one.
Doctors are min-maxers. It’s just that simple.
That’s how they become doctors in the first place. I teach 30 premeds per semester
Yes, that’s what I implied.
What’s that? My friend’s dog is asking
Min maxing is a game theory strategy (mathematics). Coincidentally useful in games and other competitions. It involves a reward and working your resources to max out your winnings while minimising the opponents’. The min max approach to a genie wish that gives you a thousand dollars but someone close to you you hate a million is to not take the wish.
But I think here who you were responding to is talking about the colloquial term: doctors focused on becoming (good?) doctors in detriment of every other skill. I personally find we in the sciences often disregard social skills too far, academically and at times professionally.
Min maxing is a legit academic topic? Awesome. I learned what it is from years of being sweaty at killing internet dragons
[Wiki article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax#:~:text=Minimax (sometimes Minmax%2C MM or,to maximize the minimum gain.) is pretty good at talking about it, yeah.
Is that some king of new trend like nft?
It’s actually more like choosing the strategy with the relatively best worst-case scenario, in general. In zero-sum games it turns into what you’re describing.
But either way, yeah, that’s not what OP means.
But it’s a specific best worst case : it’s not only about how best you can do for yourself, it’s for how far from you the opponent is. You prefer’d a -1 -100 option over a +2 +1 in minmaxing. While you’d take the second in a maximizing strategy, if there wasn’t a third option thatd be like +3 +20. All that being your reward, opponent reward.
That’s what I want to transmit to folks reading us.
Sometimes I feel like the brain has a hard limit on the amount of information it can take in, and doctors seem to hit it during their training.
It’s sort of the same effect that can prevent elderly people from grasping new technology.
Personally I think your theory seems more accurate, however…
I mean, there is a hard limit on how much info your brain can take in. It’s time. Every hour spent learning one thing is an hour not spent learning everything else.
Healthcare professionals as a whole, inclusive of doctors
I do not think it is appropriate to talk about any details, but something somewhat adjacent to this is that a lot of my colleagues didn’t go into pediatrics because they hate dealing with parents.
And I’ve also read somewhere that pediatricians who says it can also destroy you mentally when seeing parents who doesn’t really care about their children wellbeing.
I guess it tracks with not wanting to deal with shitty parents.
The antivax parents are the most annoying ignorant people on God’s earth.
I have family members who are doctors and they generally agree that the worst patients are physically/verbally abusive ones. Apart from that, they complain a lot about patients who don’t follow their advice and then get angry when they don’t get better.
don’t follow their advice and then get angry when they don’t get better.
This was my father. The son of a bitch (said with love) sawed off a cast because it itched too much.
That must be really frustrating.
Don’t they complain about hypochondriacs?
Lookup the phrase “Swamps of Degobah”
People usually see doctors when something has gone very wrong with their life. It’s scary when your body backs you into a corner, and fear makes people act stupid and angry. I would hope they could be given a little bit of slack.
Not a doctor, but my worst pt was this disabled guy who was ‘confused’ and restrained to his bed. I did an echocardiogram on him and he masturbated the entire time.
I won’t get into specific patients (I’m not a doctor but work in health care) the worst patients in general is an older person with untreated borderline personality disorder. They call screaming their heads off that the medication they’ve been on forever is giving them side effects, and it’s just that they have this void within them that you can never pour enough attention into. They’re obnoxious, demanding, and treat people in an ignorant fashion as if you are a servant at their disposal, and if you don’t answer them right away they start threatening suicide. The younger ones with BPD are largely at least somewhat aware and are calmer and just sad and tearful, but the total dysregulation of the older ones is a hell of a thing to see.
deleted by creator
I work in healthcare. My best patient is the guy who punched the rudest doctor in the face. If that rude doctor were in this thread, I bet he’d pick that guy.
Ethically horrible thing to ask. I hope no one answers.
There’s a 0% chance doctors don’t talk shit with each other about patients, just like in every other service profession. They literally talk shit about patients on charts sometimes.
The unethical thing would be if they revealed protected information in the process.
My sister doesn’t talk specifically about patients by name, but she’ll say things about what she told someone to do that they didn’t, and the consequence was exactly what she told them. Stuff like that.
Yeah. Same as a medical paper right? “A 37-year old male patient with a history of chloracne” or whatever.
My dad is a doctor. I grew up around him and his partners.
They don’t. Outside of work, they don’t talk shop and want to do anything else. Usually golf.
I won’t say never, but work is very stressful, so they do their best to leave it behind.
Interesting. I’m going to need to hear from more people if I’m going to buy that’s standard, though.
There’s established medical acronyms like “Funny Looking Kid” or “Get Out Of My ER”. The stress thing depends heavily on specialty once out of residency, and a stressful job can actually mean more story time once they’re done with a patient - just ask a paramedic.
I also had a good friend who was a paramedic until recently, and those are some gossipy bitches, lol. That guy would never shut up about work
deleted by creator
