Complaining

People love to complain. Medicine complains about nurses. Nursing complains about doctors. Surgeons complain about anesthesia. Patients complain about food. Consults complain about getting consulted. Neurology complains about anything and everything. People love to do it, and I’m especially thankful for the people who can do it in hilariously sarcastic fashion. But at some point it just gets old. It ceases to be playful and simply becomes antagonistic. Complaining eventually harbors an atmosphere of negativity and pessimism that is detrimental to team-based care. Worst of all, it reflects poorly on you. It makes it seem like you don’t want to be a physician.

We’re doctors. We should want to help people. We should love doing our jobs. Yes, some families are more difficult to deal with than others. (I’ve had one family member tell me that they need to talk to someone “two pay-grades” above me. I’ve had another tell me her husband was a partner with Feinberg and that “if he knew what was going on here, he would take back this building!”) Yes, some parts of our job are less glamorous than others. But being a doctor is a privilege, not a right.

We are lucky that we can go up to a stranger and earn their trust instantly. We are lucky to be able to break the news that they have metastatic lung cancer to their brain. And we are especially lucky when we can tell them we can cure their disease. We should spend more energy remembering how lucky we are and less energy complaining about how unlucky we are.

But it still goes on. And if there’s one specialty that bears the brunt of all this complaining, if there’s one department that is universally dumped on, it’s emergency medicine. Everyone makes fun of them. Even the nicest people on the planet have a joke on hand to poke fun at emergency. We all understand that their priorities are different than ours, but for some reason it’s still humorous to suggest that they put a CT scanner at the entrance of the ED. If we don’t know why a test was ordered on admission, we just brush it off as being expected from the ED. All these jokes are fun to laugh at now, but what about next year when I’m on the receiving end? I don’t want to be reduced to a stereotype, certainly not a witless and wasteful one at that.

The one reassuring thing I’ve taken from my experience is that people complain about what they don’t want to do. I’m glad the people complaining about emergency medicine are not the ED docs. I just hope the same people who complain at least get energized and excited by whatever it is that they practice. Because who wants to be a Negative Nancy anyway?