LMS President’s Message: TRUST
By Khalil Rahman, MD, MBA
The theme of today’s column is trust.
During the period between 2020 to the current time our medical field faced a wave of mistrust by patients. They were receiving lots of information from many sources, some of it fabricated, some of it misunderstood, but most of it evolving. The evolution of science during the pandemic was easy for physicians to understand and accept because we know there are very few absolutes in medicine and our knowledge of accepted medical practice changes. Thus, as information changed and evolved in a relatively short period of time, some frightened patients developed mistrust of the government and the healthcare system and its agents, which included physicians. We, as physicians, were not trained for this level of mistrust that we are face during our lifetime. Despite being called HEROs by most, providing the most current information of the time, still many did not believe in us or the messages we were trying to impart.
How do we change mistrust? For that, we need to work hard to find our way back into the hearts of our patients, this trust must be earned again; we must go back to the basics. One can say, “What is the new basic.” Social media is one of the places we can communicate and use for our patient’s benefit, spending more time face to face with the patient in treating their complaints is another. Our major medical organizations need to work with the media, politicians, educators, and religious organizations. Trust in the health care providers is especially important for the benefit of our nation to keep the population in good health.
