When Patients Distrust Doctors, Doctors Cannot Trust Patients
I recently took on as my master a veteran TCM physician in her sixties. She began studying medicine at twelve and comes from a distinguished lineage, yet she is extremely low-key, sees patients cautiously, and repeatedly warns me during clinical teaching to practice carefully: first ensure the patient's safety, and second protect one's own.
My master told me that good therapeutic results are built on mutual trust between doctor and patient. Patients who find it hard to trust a doctor are patients the doctor also dares not readily trust.
Because of work, I now have frequent dealings with fellow doctors. The common trait of most doctors I meet is caution and circumspection; none dares to talk big or make absolute promises, and they have many misgivings about the patients they treat, fearing that patients referred by medical institutions have listened to exaggerated advertisements and hold excessively high expectations. A rigorous doctor therefore always speaks with patients in a conservative manner. Medicine is an enterprise of very high uncertainty; medical science is an imperfect science, and often the actual outcome of treatment does not match the patient's expectations.
Because medicine deals with human life and health, its regulation has been extremely strict in all times and places, and rightly so. Throughout history and across the world there have also been doctors who died at the hands of patients or their families; medical accidents and medical disputes are common everywhere. After all, human life is supremely precious, and once gone it cannot return; any extreme emotion from relatives is understandable. I believe those doctors who treat medical risk as nothing are either newcomers or simply businessmen and pseudo-physicians; true healers are never so presumptuous.
Neither plants nor animals can avoid illness, and humans especially so. One of the greatest regrets of living in this world is probably the existence of pain and illness, and to resolve pain and illness one cannot do without doctors. But what doctors can achieve is limited: among human diseases, only about 40% are something doctors can solve. More than half remain beyond what doctors can solve; human medicine currently sits at such a low stage.
Yet once a person falls ill, it is easy to become superstitious about miracles and miracle workers. On the positive side, an optimistic, positive mood helps a patient recover. On the negative side, overly high expectations become unrealistic. Doctors most of the time must bear the excessive expectations of patients and their families; there is almost no doctor in this world who escapes being scolded. Every patient who seeks a doctor with high expectations may end up, disappointed by the outcome, running the doctor down a few times. So most of the time doctors find themselves in an awkward position: they have no intention of cheating, yet they are easily treated as cheats.
When one is ill, one naturally needs to resolve the illness. To cooperate efficiently with the doctor and resolve the illness, one must have basic trust and respect for the doctor. Only then will the doctor dare to take risks in seeking solutions for the patient. If the patient does not trust the doctor, the doctor will only dare to give perfunctory care and will not dare to take medical risks on the patient's behalf.
In medicine nothing is trivial; everything a doctor does is a matter of life and death. If patients and their families do not trust the doctor, or even hate the doctor, how dare the doctor risk the greatest dangers on behalf of patients and their families?