What a surprise...another doctor-bashing column from Dr. Meisel. Of course, this proponent of evidence-based medicine does not provide any evidence that doctors are harming their patients by subjecting them to all these cooties and germs, but it sounds frightening enough.

Yes, the culture of medicine ought to be more understanding toward illness of its own, but the solution is not to have patients behave antagonistically toward their physicians. How should a doctor feel when a patient demands he wash his hands, when he's washed them 10,000 times already that day? Or when he's told his coat is too dirty?

Lets continue to rearrange the deck chairs while the US medical Titanic sinks.

Yeah, that damned Louis Pasteur, how dare he bash doctors?

Let me ask you a question. If anything other than singing hosannas is doctor bashing, how can we ever discuss possible problems?

So the "bashing" meme has jumped from teachers to doctors now? Poor dears. Any attempt to hold teachers responsible for actually doing their job is called bashing by teacher union shills. If it works for them...

Just wash your freakin' hands, you pig. You're killing people, and you care more about your own status then their health. And that's nurses, too.

Yes, let's bash those doctors. One of my relatives died of a post-surgical infection after being admitted to the hospital for a routine operation. He was old, and his body couldn't easily cope with whatever germs the doctors were bringing in and failing to wash off. What's the death rate from hospital infections again? What's the infection rate?

Don't think that we patients don't notice, and don't think that this has no effect. CDC statistics show more transmission of hepatitis in dental offices than in tattoo parlors, for heaven's sake. Why do tattooists abide by a stricter standard than dentists?

Well, here is the beautiful thing about medicine. If you think you can do a better job, start signing up for pre-med classes. In 2021, when all your schooling and training for an MD is done, you can show all those dumb doctors how easy it is.

It's an institutional problem, not an individual one. If I become a doctor, I will be subject to the same policies that all the other doctors are subject to. Presumably, if I take enough sick days to ensure I don't bring any germs to work, I'll get fired, or at the very least, forced out of my job.

Snarkiness aside, patients are dying because of this. Do we accept those deaths as normal and expected? Or do we make much-needed changes to the way hospitals do business?

There's a lot of things patients do that annoy me, but reminding me to wash my hands isn't one of them. It doesn't matter if I've washed them a billion times before lunch--if I touch one patient and then touch another without washing in between, I'm going to run the risk of spreading something. How many patients have you seen that get admitted to a regular room and then later are found to carry MRSA? Not every patient can be automatically put into contact isolation right off the bat, so handwashing is pretty much the first line of defense in keeping this stuff contained.

I hate being told what to do, too, but handwashing is way too important to get huffy about it.

I agree Grungie. If your doctor gets offended that you asked them to wash their hands, find a new doctor. I work in a research lab with bacterial toxins and bacteria and I wash my hands probably as much as most doctors per day. It's a matter of not wanting to transmit whatever virus or bacteria that has infected the previous patient to the next patient. I understand that doctors are busy and they are on the go non stop. And I even understand how they can forget to wash their hands (I never forget but that's me...call me a hypochondriac...LOL) when they are being rushed from one patient to the next. However, these are peoples lives we are talking about. It is important that EVERYONE (not just doctors and nurses but everyone) wash their hands. It's a common sense thing that shouldn't offend anyone...especially someone who is a trained medical professional.