Resident Doctors Must Ask Permission to Use Restroom — SkimNews
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- Frances Mei Hardin, a former ear, nose, and throat surgeon, launches "Chief Complaint," a new STAT+ opinion column on challenges facing practicing physicians.
- Resident physicians in some clinical settings must ask permission to use the restroom or grab food and water, despite being in their 30s and holding M.D.s and other graduate degrees.
- Medical training often begins with infantilizing treatment even as residents assume immediate responsibility for patient lives, according to the column.
- Learned helplessness — a state in which people stop trying to change unfavorable situations because they believe they lack control, even when they don't — is what Hardin identifies as a plague on the medical profession as a result.
Why it matters: If residents are conditioned during training to believe they cannot act without permission, the habit of deferring rather than deciding may carry into clinical practice at moments when physicians need to advocate decisively for patients. Hardin, writing from the inside as a former surgeon, argues the medical establishment is producing doctors trained to ask rather than act.
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