The Medical Bell Curve: the Great Ones

The Medical Bell Curve: the Great Ones

  • Submitted By: cdeck57
  • Date Submitted: 12/05/2013 7:04 PM
  • Category: Science
  • Words: 2527
  • Page: 11
  • Views: 53

The Medical Bell Curve: The Great Ones


The Medical Bell Curve: The Great Ones
Today’s society puts doctors on a very high pedestal , portraying them as ethical, honest, caring people who do what’s best for their patients. For the most part this is true, but there are always the exceptions. As in most things in life, the medical profession has a bell-curve of doctors. At the low end, there are the bad doctors who shouldn’t be practicing medicine. Then, there are the average doctors, who take care of their patient, but don’t usually go above and beyond for their practice. Finally, just as you have Jordan in basketball or Babe Ruth in baseball, there are all-stars in medicine. These superstars are Pediatrician Warren Warwick, Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, and Physician Paul Farmer. This paper will focus on the outliers of both sides of the bell curve
Hank Goodman is an example of a good doctor gone bad. He was a well-respected doctor, whose peers would recommend family members to have operations. After fifteen years of practicing, he started making mistakes. Even the best doctors make a mistake once in a while, but this was becoming a reoccurring theme for Mr. Goodman. He was putting wrong size screws in people’s joints and put a pin in an elderly man’s hip instead of a full hip replacement because it was faster. The worst case was a woman who came in with an infected knee. Goodman was busy so he brushed her off, which caused her to have her knee fused together. It had to be fused because an infection had eaten away all of her cartilage. Without the lubricating cartilage, the joint is immovable. This was an inexcusable error on Dr. Goodman’s part, if he wasn’t so busy, most certainly would have been able to prevent this terrible thing from happening. (Gawande, 2000)
Goodman’s obvious problem was the over scheduling of patients: “He’d run through forty patients in a day and not spend five minutes with them” said his assistant. (Gawande, 2000) This was not...

Similar Essays