Tuesday, May 20, 2014

When Doctors Treat Patients Like Themselves - NYTimes.com

Many years ago I spent a lunch hour in a doctors' dining room eavesdropping on two white-coated men of a certain age idly discussing a colleague who worked at the city hospital next door.


While they themselves saw mostly insured patients, she worked exclusively among the destitute, a de facto one-woman charitable health organization. Most of the hospital community thought she was a saint. These two doctors, to put it mildly, were not impressed.


"It's easy to do that kind of work," one concluded, putting down his napkin and standing up. "The hard thing is taking care of patients who are exactly like you."


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