The politicization of Medicine is hard to watch. I’m sure there’s a more sophisticated way to say that, but that’s the truth. Most of my close family members work in Medicine. 4 doctors, a 4.0 premed student, and a couple more nurses and pharmacists. They went into it with an understanding they’d hold a place of trust in their community, and that’s dissipating before their eyes.
I’m a lawyer, I went into this business knowing plenty of people wouldn’t like what I do. But I know it’s not what Medicine wants. I think some healthy distance between Medicine and politics ought to be maintained. It’s not just the doctors’ wishes; that trust in Medicine is too important to society. It needs to be built up.
Dr. Gonsalves mentioned a few different way to accomplish that today. I wanted to throw one more. Some of the speakers over the semester mentioned how hard it is to keep everyone’s messaging on the same page. Political figures have to work to keep their jobs, and they’ll take recommendations and get creative in how they interpret them. There may need to be some courage to straighten out the record when recommendations get turned around—like a game of telephone. I think we started to see that a bit as the Covid Pandemic went on. More of it might benefit everyone and go toward building back that trust.
Your point on trust, I also believe is really important; distancing politics from medicine is definitely a good step to ensuring that trust between medical professionals and the community does not deteriorate, despite it already being plenty difficult to build up trust to begin with. As for how that trust builds up, I do think that task should be left up to physicians, who interacts with patients on an 1-on-1 basis; this also leads into my belief that more weekly-practicing physicians should be given a voice in the field of public health, since they have the most updated state on the community’s thoughts. It would be especially of concern when the public health advocates who is an MD – on paper – have not been actively practicing medicine for years now, and speaks as if they have been most in touch with the patients of the community.