We Are Physicians First, Orthopedic Surgeons Second

Abstract not available. Introduction provided instead.

I f you (an orthopedic surgery resident) are reading this, congratulations are in order. You have displayed a level of dedication and sacrifice that most people could not even fathom. As a result, you most likely graduated at the top of your medical school class by excelling in the classroom and on the wards to achieve your goal of becoming an orthopedic surgeon. Your friends and colleagues probably will say that you are extremely gregarious, intelligent, driven, and a natural leader. For the most part, your patients would agree, except for the fact that communication and empathy are not your strongest suits.¹ As hard as it is to accept, we (orthopedic surgeons) have been branded as “high tech, low touch” by most of our patients. To make things worse, our medical colleagues respect our decision making on the city league basketball court more than on the hospital floor. How did we apparently regress from medical school, when we were the most affable person our patients talked to every day and when our internal medicine chief resident was shocked (and embarrassed) at how well we knew acid-base disorders (better than some of the internal medicine residents on our third year medicine rotation). In other words, what caused us to change in the views of our patients and peers from the wide-eyed medical school graduate who took the Hippocratic oath, reciting
that “warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife,”² to the type-cast orthopedic surgeon who says, “There is a fracture, I must fix it’’? The answer: orthopedic surgery residency.