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Is an Ideal Physician a Simple Physician?
Maybe to some patients the ideal physician is simple physician. At least that is the impression given by Wystan Hugh Auden in his poem below. ..Maurice.
GIVE ME A DOCTOR
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)
Give me a doctor partridge-plump,
Short in the leg and broad in the rump,
An endomorph with gentle hands
Who'll never make absurd demands
That I abandon all my vices
Nor pull a long face in a crisis,
But with a twinkle in his eye
Will tell me that I have to die. (Resource for the poem is oldpoetry.com and noted “This poem is thought to be in the public domain”)
2 Comments:
Is this physician really simple? It seems to me that Auden's ideal physician is complacent - he won't tell you anything you don't want to hear. Perhaps Mr. Auden's rump is a bit round and he isn't interested in slimming down. If he has an overweight physician, then the doctor is unlikely to bother him about his own endomorphous physique and habitual smoking (as evident from a few pictures I found).
Often patients do not want to change. It takes hard work to change one's habits in the interest of health. Of course, if a doctor never tells you anything of use, why bother seeing one?
Alyssa, you bring up an important point. "...if a doctor never tells you anything of use, why bother seeing one?" And as you suggest: Don't bother seeing an obese doctor if you are obese or a doctor who smokes if you smoke.
It is interesting that if I understand ethicist Dr. Robert Veatch, he has written that the ideal doctor for a patient would be one who shares the same religion, moral values and other similarities in life. This would allow the doctor to be looking at life more through the patient's eyes and from the same moral platform which would be helpful in bettering the doctor-patient relationship and decision-making. Of course, one would wonder with the concept you brought up whether this similarity would truely be beneficial for the patient. ..Maurice.
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