doctors and smoking!!!

[indo]

I walked out the side door of my school and saw a lady standing on the air intake vents smoking.

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[rhiannon777]

I'm so glad to see that most of you aren't judgemental about physicians' weight. I suffer from PCOS, which makes it extremely difficult for me to lose weight. While I eat lightly, exercise, and try to keep up hope, many doctors have told me that I should not expect to ever achieve what is normally considered a healthy weight. I'll be starting my first year in August and I've been very worried about the reactions I might get to my weight. This thread was at least a little soothing to me.

 

[EmoryStud]

It pisses me off when Doc's smoke

 

[usrael]

One might think that docs smoke less due to the obvious health ramifications.
Med-school/internship/residency is pretty darn stressful so I'm not shocked by the numbers.

However, as a patient, I don't think I would go to a doctor that smelled of smoke.

 

[SupergreenMnM]

How about houkah?

 

[Haemulon]

It pisses me off when Doc's smoke

It pisses me off when someone else posts about what pisses them off.

 

[Dr. McDreamy]

The patient can't tell that you're a smoker. Keeping a straight face would be easy.

wanna bet? they can smell it immediately when you walk into that itty bitty examining room that you're a smoker.

i certainly wouldn't take a doctor very seriously if i could smell smoke on him/her.

 

[Haemulon]

wanna bet? they can smell it immediately when you walk into that itty bitty examining room that you're a smoker.

i certainly wouldn't take a doctor very seriously if i could smell smoke on him/her.

Yeh, because smoking would really prevent your IM from properly performing your prostate exam. Hell, he probably wouldn't even be able to correctly prescribe your anti-hypertensive refills or interpret the cause of your elevated liver enzymes (12 pack a day? no problem!). What a quack. And don't even get me started with the dermatologists. If they smoked, I wouldn't trust them to distinguish a melanoma from a pimple, let alone snip that annoying skin tag off of my arm-pit.

 

[pagemmapants]

OMG can we PLEASE stop talking about this topic? Go to the pre-allo forum and use the search function, damnit.

 

[Biscuit799]

There sure are some judgmental mo-fo's in here. I find it humorous how 90% of us will have no problem with a marijuana post on 4/20, but GOD FORBID a med student or doc have a cigarette every now and then...

I mean, we treat alcoholics and drug addicts with more respect than cigarette smokers. This thread makes me want to light one up...

 

[Haemulon]

There sure are some judgmental mo-fo's in here. I find it humorous how 90% of us will have no problem with a marijuana post on 4/20, but GOD FORBID a med student or doc have a cigarette every now and then...

I mean, we treat alcoholics and drug addicts with more respect than cigarette smokers. This thread makes me want to light one up...

 

[Cirrus83]

There sure are some judgmental mo-fo's in here. I find it humorous how 90% of us will have no problem with a marijuana post on 4/20, but GOD FORBID a med student or doc have a cigarette every now and then...

I mean, we treat alcoholics and drug addicts with more respect than cigarette smokers. This thread makes me want to light one up...

I don't think I'd want an alcoholic doctor, nor a drug addict doctor, so I don't know what you're going on about.

Anyways, personally I wouldn't discount a doctor's advice in OTHER matters if they smoked, but it would make it harder to take them seriously if they tried to tell me not to smoke.

Similarly it's hard to take a severely obese doctor seriously if they tell you to lose weight.

Let's not BS here, you can argue all you want, but if you're 100 pounds overweight your patient will think you're on crack if you tell them that they're going over the line from overweight to obese.

And I'm saying this as someone who's fat themselves. I know damned well I'll look like a friggin' hypocrite, which is also why I've been hitting the gym regularly for the last 4-5 months and lost 15 pounds of weight so far. Still got a ways to go, but I honestly don't want people to give me dirty looks about being unhealthily fat.

Anybody who thinks that patients WON'T notice their hypocrisy is dreaming. I'm not saying that you wouldn't be a great doctor and be a smoker, or overweight, or whatever. But as far as giving patients that SPECIFIC PIECE OF ADVICE about smoking or weight control or exercise or whatever, you'll look like a huge tool.

And yes, it would also make you a hypocrite if you were drunk while telling a patient not to drink. The scent of cigarettes would be very obvious to anybody with a nose, so don't think your patients won't realize you're a smoker. And being obese is also fairly obvious.

BTW, my own PCP is fairly overweight, and it's funny how he neglects to mention being obese as a cause of my gout attack...nor suggest that I lose weight to control it, whereas my last PCP who was quite thin was always telling me to lose weight before I experienced the morbidity that would come with being obese. So even in my own personal experience, it would seem that someone who is thin is more comfortable nagging on a patient to lose weight than someone who's fat themselves.

 

[Cirrus83]

Yeh, because smoking would really prevent your IM from properly performing your prostate exam. Hell, he probably wouldn't even be able to correctly prescribe your anti-hypertensive refills or interpret the cause of your elevated liver enzymes (12 pack a day? no problem!). What a quack. And don't even get me started with the dermatologists. If they smoked, I wouldn't trust them to distinguish a melanoma from a pimple, let alone snip that annoying skin tag off of my arm-pit.

No, it wouldn't prevent any of these things, but if the doctor even BEGAN opening their mouth about how someone should quite smoking, they will look like a tool.

 

[Haemulon]

No, it wouldn't prevent any of these things, but if the doctor even BEGAN opening their mouth about how someone should quite smoking, they will look like a tool.

Eh, perhaps. It would depend on the perspective of the patient, but your point is taken. I think someone can know that something is bad for one's health and advise others of this fact, and yet still accept the risk and do it themselves. Certainly it would represent ignoring one's own advice, but that doesn't change the inherant validity of said advice. Good medical advice is good medical advice, regardless of whether the advisor follows it themselves.

 

[TheMightyAngus]

but if the doctor even BEGAN opening their mouth about how someone should quite smoking, they will look like a tool.

The issue of whether the doctor smokes or not is moot. The message is the same. It would be ethically wrong for a smoker doctor to NOT counsel a patient to stop smoking. You are raising a moral issue. Morals should not interfere with the practice of medicine.