- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Section One Stress of Being a Medical Student Introduction
- 1 Distributed Emotional Intelligence
- 2 First Clinical Attachments
- 3 Between two Worlds
- 4 Laughter for Coping
- 5 Bringing Complexity thinking to Curriculum Development
- Section Two Stress of Being a Physician
- 6 Maintaining a Balance
- 7 Physician Stress
- 8 The Medico-Legal Environment and How Medico-Legal Matters Impact the Doctor
- 9 The Impaired Physician
- 10 How Doctors Become Patients
- 11 Healthy Docs = Healthy Patients
- Section Three Management of Physician Stress
- 12 Overcopers
- 13 Stress and Coping
- 14 Treatment and Prevention Work
- 15 Promoting Resilience and Posttraumatic Growth in Physicians
- 16 Ethical Decisions
- Section Four Personal Reflections
- 17 Surgery
- 18 The Gifts of Palliative Care
- 19 Pediatrics
- 20 Psychiatrists in Distress
- 21 Medical Students and Residents
- 22 Family Medicine
- 23 Anesthesiology
- 24 Emergency Medicine
- 25 Conclusions
- Index
How Doctors Become Patients
How Doctors Become Patients
- Chapter:
- (p.171) 10 How Doctors Become Patients
- Source:
- First Do No Self Harm
- Author(s):
Hatcher Simon
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter aims to describe why doctors present differently to other professionals, how to recognize a doctor whose health is impaired, and what to do when this happens. Doctors distort the normal presentation of illness by having medical knowledge, delaying seeking treatment, and engaging in self-treatment. Working with disease and dying also causes anxiety. There is a gap between recognition of the problem of sick colleagues and action. Factors that contribute to this include difficulty recognizing when a colleagues are unwell, as they may be masked by junior staff or forgiven by peers and their absence may cause significant problems with work load. Legislation and screening programs may help encourage greater recognition of impaired doctors. The chapter ends with practical suggestions about how to have the difficult conversation with a colleague who may be impaired.
Keywords: physician illness, self-diagnosis, self-treatment, detecting impairment, challenges in intervention
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Section One Stress of Being a Medical Student Introduction
- 1 Distributed Emotional Intelligence
- 2 First Clinical Attachments
- 3 Between two Worlds
- 4 Laughter for Coping
- 5 Bringing Complexity thinking to Curriculum Development
- Section Two Stress of Being a Physician
- 6 Maintaining a Balance
- 7 Physician Stress
- 8 The Medico-Legal Environment and How Medico-Legal Matters Impact the Doctor
- 9 The Impaired Physician
- 10 How Doctors Become Patients
- 11 Healthy Docs = Healthy Patients
- Section Three Management of Physician Stress
- 12 Overcopers
- 13 Stress and Coping
- 14 Treatment and Prevention Work
- 15 Promoting Resilience and Posttraumatic Growth in Physicians
- 16 Ethical Decisions
- Section Four Personal Reflections
- 17 Surgery
- 18 The Gifts of Palliative Care
- 19 Pediatrics
- 20 Psychiatrists in Distress
- 21 Medical Students and Residents
- 22 Family Medicine
- 23 Anesthesiology
- 24 Emergency Medicine
- 25 Conclusions
- Index
