doctoring is a funny term to me when I imagine how it came to be. I follow this thread of imagination every time I see a doctor as well as every time the profession is referred to as something fine and noble, when it is being bragged about or esteemed, and then I cannot help but to cringe a little for it. It is the doctor who is said to cure disease and save lives, thus it is also the necessary affectation of doing so which becomes inevitable, as doctors are necessarily human. Every patient a doctor sees is a test of his ability to diagnose and treat. The test can only be passed or failed without gradients of success; there are, however, gradients of consequences to failing, and in between degrees of said gradients are the spaces in which doctoring occurs. Each doctor’s ability and experience differs quantifiably. To think numerically, if one hundred graduating medical students were to take a test consisted of identifying then treating one hundred diseases from common to very rare, none would be able to identify all of them, maybe ±12 would identify most of them, the majority would, by definition, identify 75% of them, and the rest would know what half of the diseases are. Then perhaps half of the 12 top percent would know how to correctly treat all the diseases in theory while the others need to mess up once or twice in practice to get it down. This would break down in much the same way with the rest of the ±70 majority and the ±12 dregs of the class as well. These test results would be fairly normal and widely acceptable in any other class taking a test, but when it’s a doctor, and every patient is a test, these numbers become less and less acceptable. In the worst case, the doctor would diagnose wrongly and treat incorrectly, or diagnose wrongly and treat the wrong disease correctly, or diagnose correctly and treat the disease wrongly. Whether a doctor is very wrong once, resulting in extensive bodily damage or death, or habitually wrong with milder cases resulting in failure to heal, his career is seriously threatened. As most doctors are, by definition, average, so would society’s view of medical professionals be as well..if not for doctoring; so also would their salaries and the prestige be lacking. But this is not the case, I realize, as I also realize that every time a doctor makes a mistake, he can “doctor” up a reason that lays the blame elsewhere i.e. “complications.” For example the only way to know a surgeon did not kill a patient is to have another surgeon catch him in the act AND rat him out, because if a surgeon accidentally kills, he would lose everything his life is built on, and of anybody on earth who could move some organs and vessels around to make a death look, well..any way he wants it to it would be a surgeon. And were there to be a surgeon standing next to the one who messes up, he would not likely speak up due to the fact that he has either: 1) messed up before as well, 2) hasn’t messed up yet, but realistically realizes he will probably do the same one day, 3) been buddies with the other guy, 4) doesn’t want the hospital he works at to close down from being sued, 5) doesn’t want another case for raising malpractice insurance rates for himself and all struggling doctors. Or most of the above. It also doesn’t help that whenever a doctor makes a mistake the integrity and superiority of all doctors and the respectability of the hospital he works at suffers and is lessened. This is why I think that when a doctor makes his first major mistake, which I am sure all do, the choice is predictable if not easily made. Throwing away 10+ years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in schooling, losing the house and cars, marring the family name and having to go to South America to perform illegal plastic surgery for the rest of your days is the one choice. The other is to unfortunately lose another brave patient to unforeseen and unforeseeable medical complications despite having tried everything humanly possible…AND by not being malpracticated you get to save more lives in the future(quantity, not quality), while saving the innocent hospital you work at undue shame and humiliation. When the fat, tired looking nurse sticks that needle into my iv and tells me I’ll be conveniently unconscious for my minor surgery, I look at the masked surgeon nearby and absently think of other professions which involve masks and sharp knives but no prestigious degree(slaughterhouse guy, serial killer, assassin) and I think I understand doctoring; I just hope I don’t get doctored, which absurdly would be my last thought in the case that I do, haha.