Picture a doctor in your mind’s eye, and what do you see? A stethoscope, maybe. Perhaps a little black bag. And almost certainly a white lab coat.
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But that last item may be destined for oblivion.
The American Medical Association is studying a proposal made at its annual meeting in June that doctors hang up their lab coats — for good. The group’s Council on Science and Public Health is looking at the role clothing plays in transmitting bacteria and other microbes and is expected to announce its findings next year.
The objections have already begun.
“The coat is part of what defines me, and I couldn’t function without it,” said Dr. Richard Cohen, a clinical professor of medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and an attending physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “When a patient shares intimacies with you and you examine them in a manner that no one else does, you’d better look like a physician — not a guy who works at Starbuck’s.”
As Dr. Cohen suggests, in the popular imagination, a white lab coat is as much a part of a doctor’s persona as a cowboy’s 10-gallon hat or an engineer’s pocket protector. A Postgraduate Medical Journal study in 2004 found that 56 percent of patients surveyed felt that physicians should wear them. About 94 percent of schools of medicine and osteopathy in the United States have “white coat ceremonies” whereby new students don the garment to signify their entry into the profession.
Still, the current lab coat resolution reflects a growing suspicion that doctors may not be, well, always as clean as they can be. One 2004 study found that 48 percent of neckties worn by a sampling of New York City doctors and clinical workers carried at least one species of infectious microbe. Two years ago, the British National Health System adopted a “bare below the elbow” hospital dress policy that bans long fingernails, ties, hand and wrist jewelry — and, of course, lab coats.
“It doesn’t benefit the health of the patient if we wear a white coat,” said Peter Ragusa, the author of the resolution and a student at the Yale School of Public Health.
Mr. Ragusa acknowledged that little data existed that definitively ties lab coats and other accoutrements to the infections that kill nearly 100,000 hospital patients in the United States annually.
“I know I can’t prove it,” he said, “but my hand moves from one patient to another, and if my sleeve is rubbing from one patient onto another, then the potential for transmission is significant.”
Any battle against lab coats will be hard fought, said Nancy Tomes, chairwoman of the history department at Stony Brook University and author of “The Gospel of Germs” (Harvard, 1998).
“This is a reversal of tradition,” she said. “The way the physician showed his care for patients, beginning in the late 19th century, was to go from his street clothes into a white lab coat.”
This change took place in part because doctors wanted to spruce up their dubious reputation. Until the advent of such medical reformers as Abraham Flexner and Sir William Osler about 100 years ago, medical training in the United States was notoriously lax. Lectures, not clinical experience, were the norm. It was the age of horse sense and the quack.
So to more closely associate themselves in the public mind with sound science, physicians began donning the lab coats that were being worn by chemists and other laboratory types. These coats were generally beige. But white soon became the standard.
“Our notion since the 1880s, when the germ theory of disease began to take hold, is that microbes hide in dark, dirty places, and that white stands for purity, both material and moral,” said Guenter Risse, a physician and author of “Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals” (Oxford, 1999). “Wearing white coats was a symbol that you were clean.”
And yet, despite their powerful cultural history, white coats may be on their way out anyway. Not because of fears about disease, but because the authority they once connoted has been supplanted by anxiety. The term “white coat syndrome” or “white coat hypertension” is now commonly used to explain the nervousness that many patients feel upon seeing their doctor.
“There’s been a trend toward taking the coats off in the last 20 years because they were felt to be intimidating,” Dr. Risse said. “In this mechanistic and impersonal age of medicine we’re living in, some doctors have felt they could establish a better relationship in their street clothes.”
But plenty of doctors still cling to their white coats and are taking issue with Mr. Ragusa. “To quote one guy,” he said, “ ‘Are we going to go around naked?’ ”
Article By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
Published in the New York Times on July 25th, 2009
Honestly... Doctors Can't wear White Lab Coats Because of Germs!? This is a clean cut case of two things, Political Correctness Run Amok and the BLATANT Pussification of America. Since the 1800's Doctors have worn the Lab Coat and all of a sudden it's a Fucking issue!? Proooobably not. Grow The Fuck up, Shut The Fuck Up, and Get a Fucking cause that matters....
Fucking Osh Kosh B'Douche....
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
George Marks/Retrofile — Getty Images
But that last item may be destined for oblivion.
The American Medical Association is studying a proposal made at its annual meeting in June that doctors hang up their lab coats — for good. The group’s Council on Science and Public Health is looking at the role clothing plays in transmitting bacteria and other microbes and is expected to announce its findings next year.
The objections have already begun.
“The coat is part of what defines me, and I couldn’t function without it,” said Dr. Richard Cohen, a clinical professor of medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and an attending physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “When a patient shares intimacies with you and you examine them in a manner that no one else does, you’d better look like a physician — not a guy who works at Starbuck’s.”
As Dr. Cohen suggests, in the popular imagination, a white lab coat is as much a part of a doctor’s persona as a cowboy’s 10-gallon hat or an engineer’s pocket protector. A Postgraduate Medical Journal study in 2004 found that 56 percent of patients surveyed felt that physicians should wear them. About 94 percent of schools of medicine and osteopathy in the United States have “white coat ceremonies” whereby new students don the garment to signify their entry into the profession.
Still, the current lab coat resolution reflects a growing suspicion that doctors may not be, well, always as clean as they can be. One 2004 study found that 48 percent of neckties worn by a sampling of New York City doctors and clinical workers carried at least one species of infectious microbe. Two years ago, the British National Health System adopted a “bare below the elbow” hospital dress policy that bans long fingernails, ties, hand and wrist jewelry — and, of course, lab coats.
“It doesn’t benefit the health of the patient if we wear a white coat,” said Peter Ragusa, the author of the resolution and a student at the Yale School of Public Health.
Mr. Ragusa acknowledged that little data existed that definitively ties lab coats and other accoutrements to the infections that kill nearly 100,000 hospital patients in the United States annually.
“I know I can’t prove it,” he said, “but my hand moves from one patient to another, and if my sleeve is rubbing from one patient onto another, then the potential for transmission is significant.”
Any battle against lab coats will be hard fought, said Nancy Tomes, chairwoman of the history department at Stony Brook University and author of “The Gospel of Germs” (Harvard, 1998).
“This is a reversal of tradition,” she said. “The way the physician showed his care for patients, beginning in the late 19th century, was to go from his street clothes into a white lab coat.”
This change took place in part because doctors wanted to spruce up their dubious reputation. Until the advent of such medical reformers as Abraham Flexner and Sir William Osler about 100 years ago, medical training in the United States was notoriously lax. Lectures, not clinical experience, were the norm. It was the age of horse sense and the quack.
So to more closely associate themselves in the public mind with sound science, physicians began donning the lab coats that were being worn by chemists and other laboratory types. These coats were generally beige. But white soon became the standard.
“Our notion since the 1880s, when the germ theory of disease began to take hold, is that microbes hide in dark, dirty places, and that white stands for purity, both material and moral,” said Guenter Risse, a physician and author of “Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals” (Oxford, 1999). “Wearing white coats was a symbol that you were clean.”
And yet, despite their powerful cultural history, white coats may be on their way out anyway. Not because of fears about disease, but because the authority they once connoted has been supplanted by anxiety. The term “white coat syndrome” or “white coat hypertension” is now commonly used to explain the nervousness that many patients feel upon seeing their doctor.
“There’s been a trend toward taking the coats off in the last 20 years because they were felt to be intimidating,” Dr. Risse said. “In this mechanistic and impersonal age of medicine we’re living in, some doctors have felt they could establish a better relationship in their street clothes.”
But plenty of doctors still cling to their white coats and are taking issue with Mr. Ragusa. “To quote one guy,” he said, “ ‘Are we going to go around naked?’ ”
Article By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
Published in the New York Times on July 25th, 2009
Honestly... Doctors Can't wear White Lab Coats Because of Germs!? This is a clean cut case of two things, Political Correctness Run Amok and the BLATANT Pussification of America. Since the 1800's Doctors have worn the Lab Coat and all of a sudden it's a Fucking issue!? Proooobably not. Grow The Fuck up, Shut The Fuck Up, and Get a Fucking cause that matters....
Fucking Osh Kosh B'Douche....
1 comment:
just a thought...
you can curse, dude....
Project MayHAM doesn't censor our posts for fucking anyone...
"fuck" it up, brother....
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