Of doctors with watermelon-sized egos

If you ask anyone about the medical profession, they will say physicians are very arrogant. Personally, I have, unfortunately, been on the receiving end of such treatment from colleagues on some occasions.

It seems that physicians, more than most other professionals, carry egos the size of watermelons on their shoulders. In a sense, this is the type of ego selected for the career — confident, successful and achievement-driven people are the ones admitted to medical school. As a group, we are predisposed to be prideful from the start.

The medical culture can encourage assertive behaviour, arrogance and a sense of entitlement. But when we finally arrive at our objective after training, the nature of our pride has evolved. We have now fulfilled the most monumental achievement of our lives, and we’ve obtained knowledge so powerful that many people will trust us with their lives.

So maybe our arrogance is justified. Maybe we’re even entitled to some arrogance.

It’s true that some patients actually prefer an extraordinarily confident doctor, and tolerate arrogance if it comes with exceptional skills. Others have argued that the public may mistake a physician’s competence for arrogance.

Nonetheless, as the public’s trust in our profession has declined in recent years, patients are increasingly put off by what many consider an exaggerated, unwarranted sense of self-importance and infallibility.

I think this view of physicians is often unfair, but it’s probably a reaction that stems from decades of unchecked arrogance. In any case, arrogant physicians do more than just contribute to the eroding public opinion of our profession. It seems sensible to me that we must also consider the potential dangers such behaviour poses to patients.

The patient’s longing for an omnipotent physician to save him or her taps into the latent arrogance or hubris of some physicians. In effect, the patient is unknowingly fostering the very physician attribute of arrogance that the patient decries.