I rarely feel compelled to publicly criticize a medical professional. I understand that emergency…read moremedicine is demanding, stressful, and often thankless work, and I have tremendous respect for the education, discipline, and responsibility required to practice medicine. However, my family's experience with Dr. Arjun Arya during my mother's emergency room care was troubling enough that I believe it deserves to be addressed.
A medical degree commands respect for the work required to earn it. It does not place a physician above the patients and families he is entrusted to care for.
Throughout our interaction, Dr. Arya's demeanor toward my mother and me was, in my opinion, unnecessarily dismissive, condescending, argumentative, and egotistical. Reasonable questions were repeatedly met as though they were challenges to his knowledge or authority rather than what they actually were: a family attempting to understand and advocate for someone they love.
There is an enormous difference between confidently explaining a medical decision and becoming argumentative when someone asks you to explain it.
Perhaps equally concerning was the apparent assumption that because we entered the emergency room as a patient and family member, we must therefore have little or no understanding of medicine.
Dr. Arya, you simply do not know who is sitting across from you.
A person does not surrender his or her education, intelligence, professional experience, or credentials upon becoming a patient. Nor should a physician assume that a family member asking questions has no medical background simply because that person is standing beside the hospital bed rather than wearing a white coat.
The person in front of you may be a nurse, physician, pharmacist, chiropractor, paramedic, therapist, researcher, or another healthcare professional. They may have spent decades working within the medical field. They may even possess a medical degree themselves. You simply do not know.
Speaking to people as though they could not possibly comprehend the medicine being discussed is not education--it is condescension.
That attitude became particularly apparent when Dr. Arya made remarks to the effect that a chiropractor is not a "real" medical professional. There are legitimate distinctions between a Doctor of Chiropractic and an M.D. or D.O., including differences in training, licensing, and scope of practice. Those distinctions can be explained professionally without belittling another licensed healthcare profession.
More importantly, disparaging another profession contributed nothing to my mother's emergency medical care. It only reinforced the impression that credentials or opinions different from his own were somehow unworthy of respect.
I was also deeply troubled by statements regarding certain aspects of my mother's care that, based upon the information available to us, did not appear to accurately reflect what had occurred. When someone's health is at stake, patients should be able to expect honest, accurate, and transparent communication from the physician responsible for their care.
A family asking questions is not an inconvenience. A patient requesting clarification is not insubordination. And someone possessing enough knowledge to question what they are being told is not a threat to a physician's authority.
Bedside manner is not about charm or personality. It is about professionalism--the ability to communicate difficult information respectfully, answer reasonable questions without hostility, listen when a patient expresses concern, and remember that the person lying in that hospital bed is a human being who deserves dignity.
My mother deserved that dignity.
She deserved clear communication. She deserved honesty. She deserved to have her concerns taken seriously. And she deserved a physician capable of answering questions without allowing the interaction to deteriorate into what felt, at times, more like an argument over who was the most knowledgeable person in the room.
There is tremendous value in medical knowledge, but knowledge and humility are not mutually exclusive.
A degree may establish someone's qualifications to practice medicine. Character, integrity, humility, compassion, and the way a physician treats people when he holds a position of authority reveal what kind of physician he chooses to be.
And one final thought, Dr. Arya: not everyone you encounter is beneath you, and not everyone asking you a question is uninformed. Sometimes the person questioning you understands considerably more than you have assumed.
We may do things a little differently here in the South, but treating people with basic dignity and respect should not be a regional custom.
If contempt for patients, their families, and other healthcare professionals is the preferred approach, perhaps Chicago was the better fit after all.
