The Next Ten Years
A couple of days ago, a female ophthalmologist a few years younger than I am told me that in her recent work she saw a patient whose son came to her office to discuss the case, asking questions while recording a video on his phone; after the son finished asking, the patient's daughter came to the office to discuss the case and likewise asked questions while recording video on her phone.
This female doctor, two or three years younger than I, felt very distressed. When she sat for the college entrance exam and chose medical school, she could never have imagined that by the time she actually became a doctor, the environment in which she would practice medicine would be so hostile. Patients and their families have grown accustomed to presuming doctors guilty, preserving evidence at every moment in preparation for making trouble later; such patients and families keep doctors on tenterhooks. I saw Academician Zhong Nanshan, in an interview, also bluntly mention that he often encounters this himself.
Of course, such patients and families are also foolish; this behavior is pushing patients onto a dead end. The action of force is mutual. When patients and families presume doctors guilty, doctors in turn focus entirely on guarding against the family rather than on wholeheartedly helping the patient; any measure that carries slight risk but could greatly benefit the patient will not be used. They will also have the family sign a stack of liability-waiver documents. In the end, such medicine becomes passive, do-nothing care—it does the patient little harm and offers little help. Doctor-patient disputes may not flare up, but the illness cannot be cured.
This female doctor vented to me that she wished she could change careers and stop being a doctor. But now that she is middle-aged and has spent her youth studying medicine, she does not know what else she could do, so every day she works in fear and gloom, feeling quite helpless. With the recent resurgence of the pandemic, medical staff are under even greater pressure, and all of this has made her very unhappy.
She says no one in her own family would understand if she told them this, but telling me strikes a chord. Because the whole world shares the same warmth and chill, I have encountered similar problems in my own work. I am just tougher than she is. Once, when a patient's family member was recording video on his phone, I directly ordered him to stop. I told him: either delete the recording, or leave right now—I had not charged them a cent and did not intend to; I would not treat this illness. This declaration frightened him greatly, and he hurriedly deleted the video and photos from his phone. I do not advocate doctors being too tolerant on this issue, but many hospitals have set absurd policies that force doctors to tolerate things that may bring enormous hidden dangers.
I told her that over the next ten years this situation would not improve much, so if she truly did not want to stay in medicine, she could seriously consider changing careers. At the very least, she could find a part-time job; once the part-time work is enough to support the family, she can switch. She said she is preparing to take an accounting certificate. The medical license was so hard to pass and she passed it, so an accounting certificate will not defeat her.
At present, some of the world's more influential virologists believe that the novel coronavirus will persist for a long time, perhaps never disappearing. Over the next decade or so, the virus's lethality may lessen year by year until it finally becomes as inconsequential as seasonal influenza. But until that day arrives, society will remain in a relatively tense state, and the risks facing medical workers will remain high.
Recently, the BBC invited Dr. Mark Carney, who served for nearly eight years as Governor of the Bank of England, to deliver the 2020 Reith Lectures. From a humanistic perspective and through economic theory, he envisioned financial solutions to the major problems facing the world.
In his lecture, when speaking about values, Dr. Carney asked the audience to consider three paradoxes: Why is water, so vital to life, essentially free, while diamonds—beautiful but of limited practical use—are so expensive? Why have financial markets rated Amazon as one of the world's most valuable companies, while the value of the vast Amazon River region has never appeared on any balance sheet until its forests are destroyed and its leaves wither into farmland? And when we celebrate the extraordinary value of medical workers' heroism in devoting themselves to public health, how do we reconcile that with accepting their low wages and dangerous working conditions?
These three paradoxes are worth everyone's reflection. Especially in our country, most doctors' income is out of proportion to what they give, yet why do so many people treat doctors with hostility? COVID-19 is not yet over, yet the gratitude inspired by medical workers risking their lives to rescue patients faded so quickly, and people have returned to the guilty-until-proven-innocent mode toward medical staff, so guarded and critical of doctors' actions.
The pandemic has given everyone a chance to reflect, and given this society a chance to reform. Over the next ten years, if we humans keep having to live under a state of emergency like the present one, will people reflect on whether our destruction of the natural environment and our disrespect for medical workers are wrong? On the other hand, as medical workers, we can choose to stay in the health system or choose to leave medicine for other work—if we feel this job is not for us.
What will I do over the next ten years? I have thought about this too. I will continue to study biology and medicine; there is no doubt about that, because I know that ten years from now I will still love the life sciences, so I do not intend to waste these ten years. I will also continue writing popular science; as I write, I hope at least to prompt some of my like-minded readers to do some necessary thinking.
Over these ten years I will also keep improving myself and continually correcting my own patterns of behavior. In my view, so-called growth is a process of constant correction—correcting wrong perceptions, correcting wrong behaviors, correcting wrong psychological expectations. The more seriously a person corrects themselves, the fewer troubles they have.
Our human society also ought to correct itself. We have many problems: our model of political governance has problems, our way of social and economic development has problems, and most importantly, people's values have problems. Nothing is more precious than life, yet our attitude toward the resources, environment, and medical workers bound up with life is so disrespectful; so many of the things we chase as priceless are merely stones and metals of no practical value. This shows that human beings are not a rational animal.
From an evolutionary perspective, humans are still in a constant process of evolution. We will continue to grow through the lessons nature teaches us, becoming ever wiser, knowing what we ought to treat well and what we ought not to crave. So perhaps to many people the next ten years will be a miserable decade, but to me they are a golden age in which our reason is awakened. If our species, Homo sapiens, can become somewhat more sober through this lesson, then those fellow citizens who sacrificed themselves will not have died in vain.