Journal editors say the essay, by an anonymous practicing physician affiliated with a medical school, should be a wake up call.
As if the news in June that an anesthesiologist had talked trash about her patient while he was unconscious on the table in front of her, you’d better brace yourself. There’s more and it’s worse. So much worse.
In an anonymous essay published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this week, one physician describes — in graphic detail — what happened to two women when they were asleep in operating rooms. The stories are horrifying.
“I bet she’s enjoying this,” one doctor reportedly said while prepping a woman for a vaginal hysterectomy. In another case, an obstetrician performed an obscene dance after saving the life of a woman who was bleeding out after having a baby.
In a letter accompanying the essay, the editorial team agonized over whether to publish the piece. They said everyone agreed that the piece was “disgusting and scandalous” and could damage the profession’s reputation. But some argued that this was why they shouldn’t publish it while others felt that was why they should publish it.
“The discussion was so impassioned and opinions so disparate that we needed a ‘time-out,’ ” editor-in-chief Christine Laine and her deputies wrote in a letter accompanying the essay.
In the end they said they decided to do so in order to “expose medicine’s dark underbelly.” They said the first incident “reeked of misogyny and disrespect — the second reeked of all that plus heavy overtones of sexual assault and racism.”
The author, who remains anonymous (due solely through the decision of the magazine’s editorial staff) said he learned of the first incident when teaching a medical humanities course and asking, “Do any of you have someone to forgive from your clinical experiences?” “Did anything ever happen that you need to forgive or perhaps still can’t forgive?”
A student he called David said he was observing the surgery when an attending physician made the lewd comments while cleansing and scrubbing the patient. David commented, “Man, I was just standing there trying to learn. The guy was a dirtball. It still pisses me off.”
The author says the student turned the discussion around by asking him the same question. He said he “felt my face flush” and before he knew it, he told the class about the second incident, which occurred in his third year of medical school while he was on an OB/GYN rotation. He said that he ended up laughing and joining in on the doctor’s disrespectful dance until the anesthesiologist in the room yelled “Knock it off” and swore at them.
The journal’s editors said that they hope that medical educators and others will use the essay as a “jumping-off point for discussions that explore the reasons why physicians sometimes behave badly.”
“If the essay squelches such behavior even once, then it was well worth publishing,” they wrote.
Join the conversation!
We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, vulgarity, profanity, all caps, or discourteous behavior. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain a courteous and useful public environment where we can engage in reasonable discourse.