Five Ways Medical Culture Harms the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Current medical culture has evolved over thousands of years. It dictates how we treat each other and ourselves. It’s an insidious culture of self-neglect, unspoken hierarchies, jousting, and undervalued humanity.

As physicians, we are expected to establish rapport and trust with our patients while enmeshed in medical culture. Our “values, norms, and practices” are to care for patients as we would our own family members. The success we’re striving for is to have best possible outcome for all of our patients.

But our goals and culture are antagonistic; good patient outcomes will occur despite medical culture, not because of it.

The following are just five ways medical culture undermines the efforts to establish a successful doctor-patient relationship.

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