Power and Responsibility

I never lost that childhood and perhaps childish ideal that people in certain professions should be held to higher standards than "average" people. I hold a number of professions to higher standards. This includes teachers, clergy, police, politicians, and, yes, doctors and nurses. These people, and others, need to recognize the importance of their positions on the people they deal with every day. I’ve never been in those professions, but took my time as a property manager with similar consideration for others. It was a business, so foolish to make any decision that would lose money. In my case, however, it was the business of people’s homes, not just given apartments. While that does not mean I can willy-nilly assign apartments to every grifter who calls with a hard luck story or "demonstrates" their goodness by imploring the name of God or passing Hir blessing with every stage of their needful tales of woe that I personally can solve for them. I looked at that position as having a responsibility to and for the people renting from me, not just the power to toss them out. Multi-page rental agreements can make me look like a control freak at the start, but in reality I just wanted everyone else knowing what is expected of them and me and having opportunity to walk away before entering into commitment.
I don’t see much attention to the responsibilities of power these days. Maybe that has something to do with news trucks hounding then ratting out city workers because they stopped in the city vehicle for lunch or ran an errand in the city vehicle on the way home. That’s a long cry from the days of suppression. Back in the 1987-88 academic year, the journalism teacher of the high school I had attended presented a student’s (not mine, which is why I don’t name names) work as her own to the Providence Journal and allowed the piece to be published under the teacher’s own name. We all know the stories of crooked cops and self serving politicians like David Cicilline. I find all the stories stem from the same root: the abuse of power.
Doctor’s God complexes can ruin peoples’ health and well being. They whine about the rates of their malpractice insurance without stopping to consider why those rates have skyrocketed. I see both sides, and admit that we live in too litigious of a society The beneficiaries of this are insurance companies and attorneys. Doctors and patients alike only seem to suffer for it.
I would think that doctors’ best proactive defense would be to remain conscientious in dealing with their patients, in trying their best to treat every patient as an individual with a unique body and needs that will never be absolutely normal in every regard. There are no absolutes. Nothing can be absolute in preventing malpractice claims; there will always be someone ready to sue when se did not get hir own way. However, an approach free of the doctor’s ego and sense of power over patients goes a long way in decreasing the likelihood of dissatisfaction.
I don’t know how many doctors would actually do this when it is easier and rewarding in materialistic ways to blindly do as the pharmaceutical reps indicate to move new products, but I retain enough of that childish idealism to keep my fingers crossed.