By Anne C. Woodlen

My friend is some big shit in computers. I know he’s a big shit because (a) I don’t understand a thing about what he does, and (b) his job title doesn’t make any sense at all. It doesn’t have any nouns in it—he’s not anything like an operator, analyzer or coordinator. They called him into the front office and gave him his new job title. He took it back and gave it to his group. His group said, “But what do you do?” He replied, “I do whatever I want to do; you guys do everything else.”

My friend—the big shit in computers—wears form-fitting jeans to work. This doesn’t mean they are tight; this means that he’s worn them so long and with such joy that each thread has become fitted to every particular lump in his butt. They are soft and faded to almost-whiteness and he likes them a lot. Matter of fact, he took the job because the guy who interviewed him was wearing jeans. “If I could wear my jeans, then I knew it would be an all-right place to work,” he says.

My friend spent a year working on a project that went from one disaster to the next. It was his boss’s pet, but it just wouldn’t work right. One weekend he sat down and did a particular analysis of one microscopic bit of the project, then he wrote a long memo explaining what was wrong. He e-mailed the memo to his boss and a bunch of other relevant people in the company.

Monday morning his boss called him in and read him the riot act, consisting in large part of telling him he was a terrible human being and he’d better never again in his life send a memo like that to the boss’s colleagues. My friend came to lunch, bleeding profusely from serious wounds in his psyche and, looking hurt and uncomprehending, asked, “Why is he kicking me? Why isn’t he trying to fix the problem?”

Because there are two ways to make a problem go away. One is to solve the problem. The other is to prevent someone from telling you there is a problem.

I am now the possessor of certified letters from three different doctors, each kicking me out of their practice. Two of them go beyond kicking me out of their practices and actually kick me out of their professional groups. One of them, in fact, is signed by a medical director and kicks me out of an entire medical complex—a teaching hospital, no less.

And what have I done that is so onerous that I may never darken their doorsteps again? Have I failed to pay their bills? Nope. I’ve kept my insurance intact and they’ve been paid in full and in time. Have I failed to keep appointments? Nope. I appear at the right time on the right day, reliable as clockwork. Have I been abusive—sworn, spit, thrown things, called their mother’s names? Nope. Do I owe doctors anything else? Not that I’m aware.

So why are they kicking me? Why aren’t they trying to solve the problem?

I don’t know. I don’t know what the problems are. Doctors are not required to tell patients why they are being kicked out. Really. Honestly and truly. A doctor is required to send a certified letter of notification, but not a reason.

And here’s what’s struck me—what made me think of my friend, the big shit computer guy who wears faded jeans to work. The doctors are kicking me out because they are the bosses. It’s not about medicine; it’s about power.

I am a very smart person. A brilliant neuropsychologist tested me and said I have a “very superior” intelligence, and my board scores were high enough to get me into medical school. Consequently, I can see and understand the flaws in the medical system, and the errors made by the physicians in the system.

And I point them out.

I take the medical industry on its own terms and point out its own problems. When a doctor makes a mistake, I tell him so. Recently I went to a doctor who accused me of seeing some other doctor in his specialty while I was seeing him. “You saw me on May 20 and you saw her on 4/22,” he said. I pointed out to him that 4/22 was April, not May, and I had terminated with her before I saw him. No matter—he neither acknowledged his error nor apologized for it.

Doctors expect patients to be “compliant”—that’s a very important word with them—and compliance extends beyond “Take the medicine I prescribed.” It means, really, be pliant. Accept what I say without argument. Sit in the chair beside my desk and nod obediently. Do not question. Do not challenge my rightness. Make me feel incredibly good about myself. Validate me.

I have had more than one doctor, when I’ve challenged him, say to me, “I went to medical school!” but they were not arguing with me about medical reality. They were citing their medical degree as the reason why I must be obedient—as proof of their rightness. They were not telling me what they’d learned in medical school, only that they’d graduated.

Decades ago, I worked in the Syracuse University Bookstore Shipping and Receiving Department (also called “The Basement”) under the direction of a guy who was a retired drill sergeant. If you questioned why you had to do something, he would bawl, “BECAUSE I’M THE BOSS!” It not only was clear and concise, it was honest. ‘I am in charge,’ he was saying, ‘because that’s the way the system works.’

Doctors have confused medical knowledge with power. We all want to be the boss. We all, as human beings, want to state what we believe to be true, and have it unquestioningly accepted as truth. My neighbor wants me to agree with her theory that we’re going to have Indian Summer for a week, but I can’t do that because the Weather Channel is predicting temperature drops into the thirty’s starting tomorrow night and I’ve learned that they’re more often right than my neighbor. We all want to be believed and validated. My friend’s boss wanted people to believe that he was smart and had brought in a good computer project.

It is critically important to our sense of self to have people tell us that we are good, and right, but “good” and “right” are not synonymous. You can be a very good person, but still make mistakes and get it wrong. Likewise, you can get the job done right every single time and still be a son of a bitch. There is no correlation between what is right and what is kind. The parents of a child with Down’s syndrome were maligned for sending the child to mainstream kindergarten instead of putting her in a special education class. Their reply was that maybe their child could not learn to spell but, by being with others, she could learn to be kind.

Doctors do not learn kindness. They think they learn rightness—that they always and only know more than people who haven’t gone to medical school—but they’re wrong. The body is impossibly complex. No doctor can possibly know all the answers. The wisest doctor I know, in the face of my persistent questioning about a medical issue, threw up his hands and shouted in exasperation, “I don’t know!”

“Well all right,” I said, leaning back in my chair and laughing. “That’s an answer I can respect.”

I have a suggestion. If doctors worked on goodness, instead of rightness, they might be loved, and a loved person isn’t afraid to admit mistakes and ignorance. Too many doctors are trying to work out their salvation by being right, or at least maintaining the appearance of rightness. One of the ways they try to keep up this appearance is by keeping me away from them. They send me certified letters telling me to leave them alone.

Doctors, probably because they’re smarter than most people, have set up a system in which their rightness is never challenged. The Office of Professional Medical Conduct very rarely finds a doctor guilty of doing wrong. It is almost impossible to bring a lawsuit against a doctor. Doctors go forward, safe in the unchallenged certainty that they’re right about everything, and when somebody like me comes along with the guts to stand up and point out their errors, they try to silence us just like my friend’s boss did.

And how did that story end? My friend bought me lunch on Friday, laughing because the company president had just fired his boss.

Your doctor has no boss—unless you become one. If we start firing doctors we can turn the medical system around.