It spins. And...it rolls! Maybe that is what the fascination is. You can lay on it and coast across the floor and bang into the walls. It goes up and it goes down in endless combinations. Everybody wants to touch it. The kids all fight over who can sit on it. It is almost always chosen by adults in the room. What is it? It's the doctor's chair.
I can remember being in awe of that chair when I was a child. I was never allowed to sit on that chair. My adult family members always made it clear that was for the doctor. It was not a toy for me to play with.
It was about 3 years ago that I first started noticing a real shift in the attitudes of patients towards doctors. Small little gestures of lack of respect. Snide comments here and there, occasional self entitled outbursts when the desire for instant gratification could not be satisfied. I guess the more medicine is made a customer service occupation, the less the people who practice the art of medicine are respected. I didn't really ever think that would happen. To be treated like a product in Target, or like the drive thru operator at McDonalds when the patient doesn't get exactly what they want, exactly at the time they want it. But it was made very clear to me on the day I walked into that exam room exactly how patients view doctors these days.
It was a hectic afternoon, problems with computers leading to delays, difficult coworkers taking their frustrations out on others, overwhelmed staff at breaking point because of patient demands. But we were chugging along with our schedule, doing the best we could for the patients. There was a family inside, two parents, a mom and a dad, 3 small boys under 6 years old and their brand new baby girl who was being monitored for poor weight gain.
One little boy was rolling all over the room on the doctor's chair. I greeted everybody in the room. Introduced myself though I had seen them before, and asked politely for the little boy to let me sit on the chair. The father immediately became incensed. "Where is my child going to sit?" was the question I was asked, and not in a pleasant fashion.
Now this was a little bit perplexing to me on so many levels. I am a female, he is a male. I am an adult, he is a child. I am the doctor who has a job to do, he is child riding on chair like a toy despite the fact there was two adults in the room who should have been monitoring that kind of behavior. When did all of regular common courtesies of society start to be denied to doctors too?
From that point on, every question I asked was responded with an attitude and a snide comment going back to the chair. At the end of the visit, as I got up to leave, the father announced to the entire family that I was finally getting up and if someone wanted to sit on the chair now they could.
From that day on, I really started to notice the whole chair issue. I know very well that doctors are being devalued, especially primary care ones. Decreasing reimbursements, patients who increasingly disregard instructions because it is not what they want to do, outbursts by patients because of problems caused by disregarding instructions, delayed insurance payments, physical and legal threats from patients on a daily basis, mountainous increasing paperwork. I guess I can't really do anything about those things on an individual level. It is hard to take a stand. But I draw the line at the chair.
Usually when I ask for the chair, I get eye rolling, strange noises, an occasional "Really?". One patient actually wiped the orange cheeto mess from their hands onto the chair after I asked to there. I went so far as to tape a sign to the seat, asking to leave the chair for the doctor. And as with other signs that interfere with instant gratification and the tremendous "I do what I want to do" attitude that is prevalent today, the signs were ripped off. Just like the ones that were ripped off the wall asking patients not to eat in rooms or talk on cell phones when the staff are present. But, I will persist.
I need the chair. I use it to sit and talk with families about issues. To me, it means I am taking the time to talk and understand what their issues are, to explain medications and interventions. It means we look at each other on an eye to eye level. We are communicating. I'm not giving up my chair. Period.
