Px: a dose of EQ

The universe of human experience is divided neatly into two: some things get worse, and some things get better.
Doctors, for one, seem to be getting better in the EQ department. Born as people like me are in an era when the doctor is no more God Himself, so far it has been difficult to put one’s faith in a person who has spent his or her formative years learning everything there is to know about the human body and next to nothing about the human mind or the human spirit.
Milton Mayer said it all, when he said: “One of the things the average doctor doesn’t have time to do is catch up with the things he didn’t learn in school, and one of the things he didn’t learn in school is the nature of human society, its purpose, its history and its needs. If medicine is necessarily a mystery to the average man, nearly everything else is necessarily a mystery to the average doctor.”
But no more, I dare to think. At last there seems to be a crop of new doctors (and a bunch of old ones who have moved with the times) who are now interested in the sociology and psychology of disease; interested in the human being in whom the disease has manifested itself; and interested in providing more than prescription-based succor to patients.
While the new doctors may not actually hold your hand and go “there, there” – it seems that at last, in the medical fraternity, it is not seen as a waste of precious super-duper-specialization years to really listen to a patient, give him or her eye contact, and level with him or her about what exactly the doctor thinks is wrong. In urban India at least, we seem to be seeing less of a show of genius-IQs and more of a play of emotional intelligence from the medical community.
Remember the time when doctors used to talk very loudly to you? Even if you went in complaining of a sprained foot, and had absolutely no complaints about your ears? Now you can have an actual conversation with your doctor, both of you speaking in level tones. Remember the time they used to simply pooh-pooh all alternative medicine? Now they may not think much of it, but they’ve grown to at least accept that it exists. Remember the time they smirked at the elaborate way women described their symptoms (even women doctors did that)? And they would have that not-so-subtle way of hurrying women along, and addressing any medical remarks to the accompanying father/husband/brother/son, as if the woman patient was deaf or daft. Today some of them have taken a leaf from the homeopath’s book, and learnt to draw significant clues from the way symptoms are felt as well as expressed by individual patients. Remember the time that Important Doctors in Big Hospitals never stood in one place, but simply strode down the wards and corridors, with a motley bunch of worried relatives trying to get answers from them? Today they’ll actually stand still and answer questions patiently and in detail, as long as you’re not seriously wasting their time.
It’s a sign: that it’s just not enough any more for a doctor to have got straight A’s or zillion percentile points or whatever in med school and have been published in some high-brow medical journal. He has to have that old-fashioned quality: be interested in people first. Only then can he make real sense of human disease.
What I like best of all about the improved-edition, emotionally more intelligent doctors, is that they have learnt to say “I don’t know.” Uttering these three simple words has never been an easy achievement for a whole lot of people; and it used to be simply impossible to get a doctor to ever say it. Today they do, and sometimes they’ll add with even more humility: “The human body is a strange thing; sometimes we just can’t anticipate how it will behave.”
Having said that, one must say that we patients have improved too – we have learnt not to expect miracles and we have accepted that much of our health is finally in our own hands. We’ve learnt that there’s little that our doctor can do if we insist on eating, drinking and making angry in a way that our bodies simply can’t deal with.
As for not having the time or the inclination to know much outside of their field, Pune’s doctors are emerging as a great exception. When they’re not doctoring, they’re going on treks, exhibiting their paintings, learning and listening to music, bird-watching, and generally engaging in activities that, no-doubt, bring them up close and personal with life in its many hues, far away from their clinics.
Piet Hein, ever the pithy observer, had obviously met one all-knowing doctor too many, when he wrote:
My faith in doctors
is immense
Just one thing
spoils it;
their pretence
of authorised
omniscience.
Fortunately, there is a growing rank of unassuming doctors who wear their skill and knowledge lightly and make no claims to Knowing It All and having Figured It All Out.