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Docs
Don't Take Care of
Themselves When Sick
Excerpt By Merritt McKinnney, Reuters Health
NEW
YORK (Reuters Health) - Doctors often advise sick patients to
stay at home and rest, but most physicians do not take their own
advice when they get ill, researchers in the UK report.
Instead, they
often keep working to portray a healthy image for patients and
not let down their colleagues, according to a study of general
practitioners in Northern Ireland.
Dr. William
T. Thompson from the University of Belfast and colleagues interviewed
27 physicians about how they respond when they get ill.
What surfaced
in these discussions was that doctors feel pressure to not get
sick, or at least not to look or act sick.
``Nobody wants
to go and see a doctor who is sick,'' according to one of the
physicians, reflecting the feeling among doctors that patients
question the competence of doctors who get sick themselves, the
report indicates.
Doctors also
said that they felt pressure to continue working no matter how
sick they became.
``Unless you're
unable to get out of bed you'll crawl in and work,'' said one
doctor.
Part of the
reason that doctors are reluctant to take it easy during an illness,
according to the report, is that they do not want to fall down
on their obligations to the partners in their medical practice.
One doctor reported feeling ``a terrible sense of duty of letting
your partners down if you don't go in.''
The participants
in the study also said that doctors, in addition to being reluctant
to admit illness, do a poor job of following the preventive health
advice they give to their patients. Physicians in one practice
make sure to check their patients' cholesterol levels, said the
doctor, but they are much less likely to have their own cholesterol
checked.
Thompson and
his co-authors conclude, ``The list of a doctor's duties begins
with 'make the care of your patient your first concern.' We suggest
that the duty of self knowledge and self care should underpin
this.''
SOURCE:
British Medical Journal 2001;323:728-731.
Reference
Source 89
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