Without the White Coat
By Florentino P. Alerta II, M.D.

To serve and care… it is the doctor within us

Way back in medical school the basic fundamentals of being a physician are stressed out by our professors and mentors in the field of medicine—to serve humanity. That verse  had lead a lot of us physicians to believe and to deal with the most basic aspect of a person as a human being, but if we look around we have been taken over by the specialty field in which each human being is now viewed not just as patient, but just a simple organ system of the body. The days when the Iloilo Medical Society was the center of all activities like scientific meetings, discussions and lectures may have gone as pharmaceutical companies placed a lot of emphasis on the specialty fields of medicine. This could be some of the factors that mold the thinking of our community stressing out on the specialty we are in. We are commonly asked this question: “so doctor what is your specialty?” As a physician what do you tell your patient? Jokingly, I may respond to them “it is you… you are my specialty.” By then you could notice the favorable reaction of your patient. It could be that you just made a friend and someone that could make referrals, but more importantly it really feels good having placed the patient or the individual in the center of your medical career.

In search of the greener pastures in life most of our colleagues had chosen to take up nursing as a second career, armed with their BSN degree and spouse and children in tow they are bound to the land of milk and honey, the U.S. of A. then face the reality that they are physician first and nurses second. You cannot always hide that personality that we all have… the love to practice medicine, the duty to cure and care as a physician is totally different from being a nurse. The doctor’s touch for a patient is totally different from the touch of a caring nurse. In the US doctors that were employed as nurses had forgotten that there is that boundary that they must not cross, being a practicing nurse and not as physician, but some of our colleagues go beyond that scrimmage line and the consequences of being deported back to the Philippines is now a reality.

In line with medical practice we have always learned a lot from our counterpart and partners in health… the nurses. With the rapid turnover of nurses going abroad we are left with medical institutions being understaffed or having no staff at all. Our nurses are already underpaid thus they have to search for some greener pastures too. It is our good relationship with the nursing staff that we further advance good patient rapport and thus improving further the image of our medical institutions. Situations like a surgeon slapping an emergency room nurse because she doesn’t move fast or fulfill his/her orders is just uncalled for when it comes to doctors-nurses relationship (I hope the entire medical community will take note of this incident and support the bandwagon of the emergency room nurse in seeking justice on the incident that happened to her, the medical ethics  committee of this institution should look deeper into this incident, we are already losing a lot of nurses due to immigration abroad by letting this incident pass. What makes us as doctors?… we just push around nurses or treat them as our slaves?, I disagree. My mother is a retired RN in the US and without her we could have never seen the better opportunities in life and I look highly to my mom as a nurse just like other nurses I see in the wards of  the hospital).

As physicians we were trained first as doctors to care, even if we still pursue a second career, it is the doctor within us which still prevails.

Whatever careers we pursue secondary to medicine we still go back to that primary or first love we have... it is not helping or caring for humanity as first learned in medical school, but it is the difference that we made in the lives of our fellow human being…to care and not just a sense of medical treatment or cure… in the end we are still doctors in heart and in soul.