Why do certain professions get treated so differently?
The idea of a physician is relatively new. The experience of walking into a cold gray sterile room sitting on rustling paper and thinking about what unique set of circumstances brought you to be in this very moment is a hallmark of modernity.
As I grow older I’ve had the opportunity to be on the “other side” of many transactions. As a child, you are almost always one the customer side. From ordering your first popsicle out of the ice cream truck to asking for two movie tickets on your first date, we are raised as customers. But at some point we all cross the aisle to the “other side.” We become servers. Not necessarily literal waiters and waitresses, although that would not be out of the ordinary. But, servers to the customers that we once were and that we still sometimes are. When this shift happens, we begin to see the view of authority change. We are now authority. We see behind the curtain to find an unpolished truth.
It is this experience of discovering what’s behind the curtain that has fascinated me ever since I started to grow up. Seeking truth has been a mesmerizing journey, one that never ceases as I encounter more situations and my gullibility meter calibrates.
From learning to operate a cash register, to making websites, slide decks, crunching data tables, and working in bank operations, I’ve learned that it truly is a thinly veiled curtain. People are people, no matter their title or position. At one point in time, they knew about as much as a baby, because they were one. Today, they know just enough more than you to be the figure of authority in a particular transaction. And that’s okay, for virtually every interaction I have in life. I’m glad that the waiter at the restaurant knows a bit more about the menu options than I do, I’m glad that the talking heads on videos tell me something I didn’t know, I’m glad that musical artists pull together all sorts of different musical concepts and mesh them beautifully. I want the people who are good at what they do to flourish and put out great things so that everyone else who is less expert at those things can enjoy the creations from experts. This is a good society.
Sometimes, those experts are the people who hold the most precious thing we have in their hands. Our life. This is why it’s different. Unless we know a Doctor as a friend or family member first, we hope that doctors play as small and unimportant a role in our lives as possible. Yet, when life doesn’t go the way we planned, these medical professionals become all important. They are the one profession offering the solution to the one product that is truly final. These professionals stand on the other side of the counter with not a choice between Coke and Pepsi, or an iPhone or iPad, but a chance at survival. Sometimes the difference between life and death.
