Your Doctor is Just Your Mechanic

It is common for patients to regard their doctors as authority figures, especially after having received a “terminal” diagnosis.  Being in a vulnerable medical state, it is easy to react to a “death sentence” proclamation as the word of God.  Yet in medicine, as in any other profession, there are good and bad doctors, knowledgeable compassionate practitioners as well as mediocre knee-jerk ones.  Some health providers treat their patients by the book, handing out medications without placing them in a personal context and offering little or no emotional support.  Yet others understand that there can be wiggle room for alternative treatments, attitude, and medical updates.  When it comes to serious disease, no doctor is infallible and no diagnosis is uncontestable.  If there were completely successful regimens to cure us from our threatening conditions, we’d all be following them.  In the meantime, we need to keep our eyes and minds open when seeking medical assistance.

I feel that it is better to regard physicians and their staff as trusted advisors than to give them the ultimate say in how to combat a life-threatening illness.  Consulting with a doctor can be much like taking a vehicle to a mechanic for diagnosis and repair.  When we put a car in a mechanic’s safekeeping we trust that he or she knows their craft and hope they can fix any malfunctions.  Whether we need adjustments, lubrication, additives, or new parts, it is expected that we will go along with the program, or if not satisfied, go to another repairman with whom we feel more comfortable.  There is seldom the emotional baggage or expectation that we project onto our medical providers.  It is easier to be more objective with a machine than with our bodies.

Seeing physicians akin to mechanics can give a better perspective of how they can help us.  Much of medical practice has the same goals as car repair, improving the function of our organisms by servicing, fixing, and/or replacing parts to help make the whole run more efficiently.  Whether one visits a humble general practitioner or an experienced sophisticated specialist, it is important to realize that the quality of care and restoration of health is subject to variability from one provider to the next.   This why second or even third opinions are often wise when one’s future is under the gun.

Some doctors follow their Hippocratic oath to attend to their patient’s needs to the best of their ability while others essentially go through their motions with little qualms about consigning patient after patient to a proverbial used car lot or junkyard.  Sometimes a creative mechanic is able to restore an auto that seems to be at the end of its road.  Similarly, there are medical personnel that have an uncanny ability to pull a rabbit out of a hat and set our bodies moving in a healing direction.   It is important to be as discerning with our physicians as we are with our vehicle repairmen.  Like with any other profession, caveat emptor.  Despite their many years of study and internship, many doctors are placed on a pedestal that they don’t necessarily deserve.