Theodore Schwartz: belief

Transcript context

…But wouldn’t a substitute be called for? If I’m the patient, I would want it arranged in advance that my surgeon — if that happened, they would sub in someone else. Maybe they raise the price to me. Even if some individuals might do it just fine, I would never know that. Right. Think about it. Back when Harvey Cushing was a neurosurgeon, there was no one to sub in for him. There were no neurosurgeons. The field didn’t exist. He was the first surgeon to dedicate his life just to neurosurgery. It wasn’t like there were other surgeons that had even remotely the ability. Even Harvey Cushing, with his son’s death weighing on him, would’ve given you a better outcome than any other surgeon of that era. Now, in the modern day, yes, of course, there are hundreds and hundreds of competent surgeons who could sub in, and yes, a surgeon nowadays should cancel that operation and hand it off to someone else. You can’t arrange for that in advance. We don’t have the ability to do that. I often think about that the morning when I see my patient. Before we go into surgery, every morning we come in, we see them, and we do consent, and we talk to them. I can speak for myself. I usually go to bed at ten o’clock the night before, and I haven’t had a bit of alcohol because I want to make sure I perform at my best. But that patient doesn’t really know what I’ve been through. They don’t know that there wasn’t some horrible tragedy in my life the night before. They don’t know that I didn’t binge on something or that I’m not a drug addict at that moment in time, because we don’t do drug testing, and we don’t do any sort of testing for surgeons before they walk into the operating room. I’m not saying that should be done because I think we’d all like our freedoms and not like to be under that kind of scrutiny. But it is ironic. We do give an enormous amount of trust to these individuals without really knowing what’s going on in their heads. I think surgeons are expected also to . . . We’re held to a higher standard, and we should be. We’re expected to take care of our personal lives in a way that separates it from the work that we do. Putting yourself aside, do you think you’re a happy group of people overall? How would you assess that?…

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