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Blogs by David W. Page
A New Beginning 10/29/2018 7:29:10 AM
I just retired. Gone are the long hours, the difficult operative cases, the insurance hassles. Now, I'm interested in returning to my biggest interest which is in the unspoken issues that make American health care so exasperating and hostile to patients. For example, sexual harassment in the HC workplace has gone unaddressed for decades. Yet, in the last year the New England Journal of Medicine published three lead articles on the subject. I'll be writing about what's new in health care going forward. #MeToo has changed the way we think about gender equality. So much good has arisen from the work of brave woman who have crushed powerful men who abused them with impunity. In my own experience, I remember the first women to become surgical trainees. They were courageous in the face of arrogant white male surgeons who looked down their noses at these females who are now 50% of the surgical trainees in some programs. I was instrumental in helping the women in our training program over four decades and feel proud of the help I provided to them, especially in the early years. But, the work isn't over. We need support from you, the patients and families, who also at times abuse women surgeons. Women in medicine should be valued. A study showed, for example, that patients cared for by female doctors after suffering from a heart attack did better than those cared for by male physicians. Empathy and compassion count. And women are really good at it. I'll examine more of the issues of gender equality in HC in the future.
