On Kindness

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I had treated her fairly uncomplicated problem and a week later she felt a little bit better than she had before coming in. She brought me a jar of jam and a lovely note in which she expressed that she was so lucky to have “such a wonderful doctor”.

I felt like a rock star. I had hit it out of the park. William Osler should read my memoir and despair.

jam because I’m a great doctor. She brought me jam because she is a nice person.

She was a nice person and being kind to her was easy. She went around town collecting kindness. Te bagger at the grocery probably trips over himself to give her egg carton a little TLC. She probably has not had to pump her own gas since the Nixon administration. And for every mitzvah, she probably thanks the person delightfully and makes them feel proud and wonderful.

Ten we have the other people. Te ones who seem to have been been raised by wolves, or not at all. Tere is my

I have never heard used outside of period films from the

not normative behavior or that it will be unlikely to help him next time he goes to court. And there is Daniel, who is huge and menacing and whose PTSD, when triggered, results in his treating everyone around him as though they had committed a recent act of aggression.

may be possible to be kind to them. But how would you handle Rachel, who gleefully announced that her recent home invasion charges were being dropped “because the kid who it happened to died”? And by “died” she means “killed

How about Scott, whose brother is the enforcer for the local chapter of the Aryan Nation and who came in one day with a swastika tattoo on his neck? When I told him he was breaking my heart and he was better than that, he replied “it’s ok that your husband is a Jew as long as he is white.”

I do not accept their behavior. I do not tell them anything they do or say is A-OK and fine by me. I discharge people from treatment when they do not adhere to my guidelines and I call the police or DHS if I feel someone is in danger. I do the right thing by my community and by the law. I have been the star witness in a case in which my patient lost parental rights to her children. I am not an enabler and I am certainly not a doormat.

But you know what else I’m not? Cruel. A bully. I’m not the orthopedist who walked in to Daniel’s hospital room and told him “I know just the surgery you need but I’m not doing it because you’re an addict and too unstable!” and then walked

not the ER nurse who smugly told my chronic pain patient that her unilateral facial droop was probably due to “all the drugs

her and trying to send her to “rehab”, even though she was actually having a TIA. I’m not the tow truck driver who told my patient outside the recovery center, “move your car, junkie,” something he would have never felt empowered to say, had he not been aware of the tacit societal agreement that poor people and addicted people are not entitled to the same kindness as the nice old lady with the jam.

You know what I am? An osteopathic family physician. Where other doctors have a scalpel or a chemo drip, our most important tool is the relationships we form. And these are forged in kindness, not in sanctimony and not in power plays. Anyone can be kind to the child with strep or the pleasant older

important. Because everyone will be kind to the jam lady. But

we may be the only people this week who will show kindness to the felon with the drug problem. We may be the only person in the world to touch them in a caring way.

It’s tempting to take out our aggressions on the people who seem to beg for it. We would have the support of our peers

it coming. But we are better than that. We don’t come to work

the function of society or the practice of medicine better when we use our role and our power and their dependence on us to

their manners.

It is not easy, particularly when you realize that some people have done nothing to deserve gentleness or support. I need

the lines:

Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse honest and sincere, people may deceive you. Be honest and good anyway.”

It has been my great honor to be the editor of this journal for the past few years. I hope you all will retain an osteopathic identity and remember what makes the practice of family medicine special and important, and that you remember that although not everyone may be held in high regard, everyone deserves respect and kindness, and to be treated as though they hold inherent worth and dignity. Because at the end of the day, the way we treat the downtrodden, and the way we treat each other, is not about who they are. It’s about who we are.