So recently my attending and I are in the pre-op room talking to an adolescent patient and his mother. The patient is nervous. His mother, a very nice woman, attempts to console him and says "you know our neighbor across the street, she is an anesthesiologist too." She then turns to us and asks us if we know __________. We say that we don't.
I later google the person's name and it's definitely a CRNA.
The public's perception of our profession is nowhere near where it needs to be. Shaking my head all day.
Welcome to medicine. Plenty of people incorrectly categorize medical professionals, and it's not going anywhere. Self worth shouldn't be judged by the perception of others.
All patients are spectacularly unequipped to assess the quality of the care they get. Most understand 1/4 of what a casually informed "consumer" should (consider the amount of time the average person spends researching an iPod purchase vs the elective surgery they've scheduled). Worse, most understand about 1/100th of what they think they do.
And that's when nobody is lying to them. You can bet this patient's neighbor wasn't leaping to correct any "misunderstandings" about her credentials.
