Real World Medicine as seen by Mayes DuBose, MD
Part 5 of 6 | January 31, 2025
The Irrefutable Leadership of Physicians in Healthcare
A recent AARP article title: “Where have all the doctors gone?”
A not infrequent Doximity article: “My private practice is dying.”
A SC Senator recently testified on the floor of the State House that “doctors are increasingly unavailable” and therefore scope for non-physician providers should be expanded.
This is the world in which we live. This is the environment in which we practice.
What do we do when it seems the system no longer values our expertise and training?
It is easy to lose faith. It may be more accurate to say it is easy to lose sight of why we became physicians. There is a unifying thread through all of us who chose to sacrifice an incredibly significant portion of our time, money, and freedom to endure the rigors of medical school and residency. Many of us have become jaded along the way but at the outset of our medical education, there was a passion to learn this science & art to care for our patients.
I have never been one to display my medical education and long hours of training as a badge of honor; it has always felt distasteful, and I have leaned towards humility in that regard. But the longer I have practiced medicine and the more I have watched other groups lobby for a quicker path to what we battled to achieve, the more I think humility may not be the approach we need at this time.
I can testify my patients love the time I am able to spend with them and they value my expertise. They have a sense of the arduous training I went through and respect me for it. It is not a direct conversation I have ever asked them to have with me or praise I have tried to elicit, but I know it is why they come to see me and leave the exam room with a humbling amount of faith in the advice I provided. They know I am human and fallible, but they also know what I went through to be able to have the honor and responsibility of being their physician.
My grandfather’s gravestone has the inscription: “And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8.” That verse rings so true for me, and I would never argue the Bible’s respect for humility, but in this political fight for who is most qualified to care for our patients, I think we need to “brag” a little more and remind legislators that we are doing so to protect our patients. It is irrefutable that physicians are the most qualified (by far) to serve as the leaders of the healthcare system, not for our egos, but for our patients.
Maybe physicians are less available today. But that is a completely different discussion and far more complex. We absolutely need a healthcare system which values physicians more and there are an incredible number of moving pieces in the solution to that problem. To maintain our focus on the most immediate problem at hand with currently proposed legislation in South Carolina, I would say physicians know we are tired, dismayed, and teetering on burnout, but we still love our patients, and we will fight to protect them. We all agree physicians are the only ones able to say we are supremely qualified to be the leaders of the healthcare system. Additionally, when the distractions and subterfuge are stripped away, we all should agree the primary purpose of the healthcare system is to care for our patients.
The SCMA asks you to be ready to answer our call to come to Columbia to brag on physicians to our SC legislators and explain why this should not really be a discussion. We can help them understand their most important goal should be to maintain high quality medical care for the residents of our state and we are the ones to do it.
Read more "Real World Medicine" articles by Dr. Mayes DuBose:
