January 12th, 2018

Today, I visited an attorney to assist me with writing a letter.  As I spoke to him, I realized just how nervous and worried I was.  Is this guy really committed to helping me, or is he only motivated by fees?  Is he competent enough to help me, and how will I know in advance?  I was reassured after meeting with him, and afterward I thought about how his role and mine are similar in some ways, and how his clients and my patients have a few things in common.  When someone goes to a doctor, he is vulnerable and lacks a certain type of specialized knowledge.  Just as I do not have sufficient knowledge of the law to help myself, so a patient does not typically have the medical knowledge to help himself (although I have met more than one patient who has diagnosed himself using information found on the internet, and done so after multiple doctors failed to help them).  He has to put his trust in a stranger - and take the doctor's word that he a) is a doctor, b) is capable of providing and authorized to provide expertise, and c) is truly determined and motivated to provide that expertise with the goal of helping him in his time of need.  That is quite some faith to place in someone you actually don't know very well.  I can see why a person would rely on the internet to at least confirm that a "doctor" is, in fact, a doctor.  There is quite a leap of faith that a person takes when entrusting something as incredibly important and fragile as one's health, to another human being.  It is a wonder that such relationships between human beings came to be at all, and that this special doctor-patient relationship has endured through thousands of years and across so many cultures.