Apropos the Berkeley “racist” role-playing incident, reader Bob Woolley writes:
A patient was once telling me about her recent visit to the ER. She waited a long time, then left without being seen. She was angry at the long wait. The hospital was in a part of town with a large population of Hmong immigrants. My patient said she was mad and left because she couldn’t stand sitting in a waiting room full of “gooks.”
I was completely taken aback, because this came out of nowhere. Although it didn’t directly bear on the medical problem, it was a pertinent piece of information, because (1) it suggested that her problem wasn’t terribly serious, if she could be dissuaded from seeking immediate help by such a petty concern, and (2) it told me worlds about her personality, her general level of anger at the world, etc.
I had no idea how to deal with this — it was in my first year of practice. I wish that something like that had been the subject of a role-play during medical school.
But if it had been, would the instructor have been subject to recrimination for violating a racial harassment policy? More importantly, I wonder if such things were not role played because of an instructor’s fear — justified or not — of such recriminations.
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