I have never had issues with this specific problem. However, I can recall many times being on call and getting called by someone junior to me, where I probably sounded "out of it" or even "drunk", when in actuality I was exhausted, sick, up all night doing work etc.
I will try to make this as basic as possible for some people here. Very basic.
Imagine you're an attending on back up call and you're sick, exhausted, at a party drinking(maybe even drinking too much) etc. You get a call from a resident/fellow about a patient in the middle of the night and you handle the situation perfectly because you know whate you're doing and you can handle issues on call. You may sound like a disaster on the phone, but you knew what you're doing. Weeks later you are called in by administration because some spouse who you have never even met in any capacity, let alone professionally, may have told the wrong person they thought were you inebriated and somehow that info got relayed to people at the hospital you work at (not a unlikely scenario). Medicine is a very small world. Word can travel quickly. How absurd is that? A physician can potentially have their career in the toilet based off a statement by someone who they don't even work with? Im not sure why this concept is so difficult for SDN users to comprehend.
The fact that the OP went on this website to voice their concern shows they are stepping out of their lane and have the potential to pursue this further. If you didn't witness it personally and have had no direct professional contact with the doctor in question, you need to know your role. Human dynamics are incredibly complicated and thinking you have have a gauge on a situation based off of what your spouse relayed to you is absurd. If the decision making by the attending was so impaired that the patient(s) were negatively affected, then the doctor who actually interacted personally with that attending should learn to become an adult handle the situation themselves. If you're not directly involved in the patient care of a patient, your opinion of everything about the interaction of the doctors involved is worthless.
Another basic example: If you're a doctor and you're spouse performed a surgery with an attending and complained to you about some poor decision making with an attending during surgery. Would it be acceptable for you (who was not even in the surgery and probably not even in that field of medicine) to voice your concerns in a public forum? No. You weren't there. You didn't witness the situation first hand. Sit down.
Not sure how much more basic I can make this argument, but I tried.
