Dr. God-complex

At work the other day, I heard such profanity as I've never heard in real life before. It was like the YouTube clips of The Departed or Good Will Hunting which feature four straight minutes of profanity. I swear, no pun intended.

Really, I have never heard the F-word used so much in real life. "Pass me the f&#!ing [this / that]." "Could you f%!@ing hurry up?" "Jesus, what the F^&! is taking so long?" Literally hours of swearing like this.

I have to believe that in any other field the person spouting these epithets would be fired - who would stand for this sheer disrespect? What other working professional, what other adult, could get away with this sort of behavior?

Only surgeons. What is it about medicine that makes people feel they have carte blanche to do whatever they want? They can speed, run red lights, swear at everyone in the operating room, talk incessantly about themselves, and society is supposed to put up with it. After two-plus years of medical school, I understand the joke in the West Wing where President Bartlett, upon meeting someone who mentions his son is a doctor, says, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm married to one. Wait, you meant that as a good thing."

Something about the medical field makes doctors and doctors-in-training think we are above everyone else. Don't get me wrong - medicine is an amazing profession, surgery's incredible (more so when it works, which isn't every time). Yes, we save lives. But so do a lot of other people - in different ways, some more obvious and some more subtle. Soldiers, aid workers, lawyers who defend otherwise vulnerable people against the death penalty, against dictators, against all sorts of crimes; teachers who work in the inner city and make sure all kids have a shot at a career and a life; engineers who design the devices we doctors use.

No, there is such hubris in medicine, and what gets me is that many doctors - even medical students - acknowledge this without the slightest hint of remorse. The same surgeon who swore for hours at every person in the operating room (besides the patient, who was under the age of one) bragged to me later about how I'd be telling my friends about the asshole attending I met. I've had other people admit to me that they feel they are entitled to passage through traffic because - as a second-year medical student - they're worth more than, you know, the lawyers and city officials and firemen and nurses and teachers and parents making their way home after a day at work. I'm not joking.

Do I sometimes hear what people do and think, whoa, where's the greater good in that? - and feel a little superior. Yes, I do. But the self-righteous proclamations of those in medicine are worse, I think. We're on our way to making a lot of money - potentially, though there are plenty of docs who don't make the outrageous salaries of, say, neurosurgeons.

My desire to do work that matters and which helps others is one of the things which drew me to medicine, but I will readily acknowledge that medicine does not have a monopoly on work that matters. Far from it. I frequently think that if I really wanted to have a big impact, I'd drop out and go into journalism, or teaching, or law.

I realize that assholes can be found in every profession and every avenue. It just seems that there are a lot in the medical field, and I will have to work with these people for years. I just hope I don't become one.