Hard-Hearted Medical Care
ByWe define Soft Sell Marketers as care givers and change agents, and ordinarily medical doctors should fall into that category. After all, they aren’t trying to sell you stocks or get you to refinance your house. And typically they’ve taken the Hippocratic Oath which, according to Wikipedia, confirms, “I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.”
Yet, many people experience the medical profession as sadly lacking in heart, money-hungry rather than placing a sincere care for patients’ well-being at the top of their priorities.
Just the other day I ran into a vivid example of why MDs suffer the fallout of their unconsciously hard-sell approach.
I called a local medical office I was referred to by a friend and was shocked by the rude lack of care in the outgoing phone message.
Follow along with me and imagine how you would feel when you phone the doctor’s office and the phone message is, “If you are a physician or hospital press one. If you need our address or fax number press two. If you need medical records press three. If you have billing inquiries press four. If you are a patient and wish to make, change or cancel an appointment press five. If you need to speak with a medical practitioner press six.”
How do you feel when you realize that you, as a patient, rank at the very bottom of the doctor’s priorities?
Bad enough. But it gets worse. When I requested an appointment for Jim (who’d had a couple of peculiar fainting episodes), the woman at the appointment desk said, “We can’t make an appointment without a referral.” I said that we’d been referred by someone who worked for the medical school and was not an MD. “As I said, we can’t make an appointment without a referral.”
So I said, “Okay, I’m a psychologist. I have a PhD. Can I make the referral and describe the symptoms in my referral?” “Yes. The fax number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.”
So I wrote up the referral and faxed it in – not mentioning that the patient was my husband, of course.
When I called back to make the appointment I was struck by the blind bureaucracy running the place. Why? Because, even though I am not an MD, my referral counted. It was all about bureaucratic protocol.
And then for the next shock. We couldn’t get an appt for 2 ½ months. When I complained that having to wait that long was completely unacceptable, no one suggested the possibility of seeing any other of the MDs who worked in that office.
So we called our friend who’d made the referral, and through his influence, we were able to get an appointment just three days later.
Hard sell, buyer-beware business tactics don’t just belong to the realm of finance and real estate. It’s lurking all around us, ready to be brought to light and transformed for the benefit of all.
Because It’s All in the Connection,
Judith
What a shocking experience you had.
I guess it is because Doctors have been conditioned to only look at treating symptoms using the drugs with the highest commission instead of looking for the real cause for the patient’s dis-ease – his thinking.
The drug companies have no interest in finding cures so suppress effective drugs like MMS (O2Cl) that has helped thousands of people in Africa to recover from Malaria & AIDS
Oh Judith, not only were you in a position of wanting an appointment, but also worried about your special partner! I can empathize and I also know a little about the other side of it… I have some friends who used to be “family doctors.” They are a husband and wife team and two of the most caring individuals you’d ever want to meet. They got out of a thriving cradle to grave practice they started because with government and insurance regulations, they couldn’t call the shots of whom they wanted to see, how long they wanted/needed to spend with each patient, how to set up their office, down to where the refrigerator was kept!
In order to give themselves some breathing time, they hired an office manager (who was a lovely person) but in order to stay within the guidelines of the hospital the doctors practiced out of,and the insurance companies who paid them, she was required to set up an answering machine pretty much the way you describe it. He told me that he felt like the only thing these doctors could do was decide who they would work with as other professionals in their office. Like my friends, they were all beautiful heart-centered people. My friends retired at age 50 because he developed a heart condition and she was becoming a nervous wreck. Three of their co-workers –all family practitioners, also dropped out at the same time. So my part of the world is now missing some truly caring individuals who also happened to be MDs. For this reason, I am glad that I also know alternativeand complementary healing practitioners, and am myself someone who offers alternative help. I wince when I have to send a client for a test because I know that they then become a number most of the time. I think it has a lot to do with the state of healthcare, specifically insurance and government regulations. These things were put in place to “save money” but whenever government gets involved it appears to me that the consumer pays both ways and no one profits.
Judith,
If this was really about marketing that would be a sorry world wouldn’t it!
This is not about marketing or presentation or PR.
This is about something much deeper then that for sure.
When medicine became a business it lost it’s reason for
why it exist in the first place.
This is no light soft sell topic.
This is a very sad set of events.
Let us not confuse appearances with meaning unless the appearances reflect the inner truth.
So what I see here is that the attitude and practices of the medical systems and their real motivations is authentically reflected in the outer presentation of this particular medical facility.
I really want to say something here that is important. That is : The value of Soft Sell for instance is not in the use of the language. Bur in the truth of the meaning.
So if I am really an over worked, insensitive, insurance driven medical system. That rarely if ever has a heart or even real caring. Than I prefer they do not hide behind the disguise of a market research presentation. I would prefer to know by their presentation what they really represent. So then I can move on to some thing that is appropriate to my own desire to be truly respected and dare I say even loved.
What I yearn to see is truth . And that truth must be allowed to reveal the nature of the motivation driving the expression.
I am tired of the tendency that has grown to massive capacity in this culture.In which we dare not feel the feelings in the core of our being that tell us in no uncertain terms when the words spoken are incongruent with the purpose of the speaker, In other words I am tired of watching liars speak with forked tongues as we all pretend that we don’t know the truth because they may learn a better marketing tactic to hide behind.
In the truth;
Jim
http://www.wisdomwithinrevolution.com
Judith and Jim,
You are so on target. I could rant on and on since this is one of my pet peeves. Instead, I encourage everyone to treat their doctors as they wish to be treated. Maybe when we show respect, it will catch on and be returned.
Dr. Debra
Jan,
What a painful experience for everyone involved. It’s so sad that the truly caring health professionals are so often driven out of practice by these hard sell restrictions. Certainly I ran into it with insurance companies when I was in private practice as a clinical psycholgist in Santa Monica, CA.
Thank you for taking the time to share your friends’ story –
Judith Sherven
http://www.softtopiccopywritingsecrets.com
Philip,
I agree with you Philip and add that doctors have become accostomed to the mechanization of medecine — machines and drugs — almost the mathematics of medicine — rather than the humanity of what they’re doing.
I expect that from surgeons. They have to be mechanical. That’s their process. And the patient is unconscious.
But otherwise, the absence of heart , for the most part, and the surrender to business is striking.
As Judith said in her response to Jan (above), she had the same problem as a Psychologist with insurance companies. Their restrictions and demands reduced the profession from an art to little more than a maintainance jpb — which why she started coaching. For the freedom to practice.
Jim
http://www.fearofbeingfabulous.com
Debra,
Mutual respect. As they say — What a concept?
Mutual respect is at the heart of a Soft Sell, partnership-based market transaction. Two human beings seeing the human-beingness in each other.
We’ve got a way to go — but go we shall.
Jim
Jim,
I appreciate the care and depth you express in your comment.
I agree that Soft Sell is not about language but meaning. However, as someone dedicated to marketing from the heart, the congruency, the wholism between language and meaning is central.
Representation and what it represents may be difficult discern — if someone is a master of deceit — but once we know the deceit it becomes obvious just how deceitful the presentation was. The presentation always reveals the motive.
What we, you and I and many, many others dearly want is to be told the truth — no masks, no games, no protocal, no hype, no manipluation. But we, as a culture, have surrendered to pretense as seeming to be the nature of doing business. “That’s just the way things are,” and we lay down.
You say you want to be respected and even loved. Only when the culture as a culture — that is, all of US — is willing to see the effects of the institutionalized deceit on each other, the planet, and life itself, will we be able to dig out of the “that’s just the way it is” hole and begin to make the changes necessary.
That we all “pretend we don’t know the truth” is pandemic and thereby castrate ourselves, individually, collectively, and deeply, deeply spiritually.
Jim
Judith;
Yours is certainly not a unique experience. Doctors are no longer the kindly thorough dedicated professionals I knew as a child- but it’s not their fault. Indeed, once the pinnacle of society (every mother wanted their daughters to marry one, their sons to become one) are now virtual slaves to their noble profession, working 80 or 90 hours per week to support the massive uncaring staffs they are forced to retain and support because of paperwork requirements of their insurance company masters.
My question is- what does insurance have to do with medicine and medical arts? The only possible place it belongs is as protection against catastrophic medical costs; it has no place in routine medical care as evidenced by the insane rise in costs since they have been involved. Insurance works on a “cost-plus” basis- just like the fabled defense contractors. There is no interest in containing costs under such a pay plan, in fact, just the opposite is true- THEY make more money when costs go higher.
We will never solve the problems with health care in this country as long as these leeches are involved in the process. The amount of money they make assures that they won’t relinquish their position voluntarily and also assures that they will be able to lobby Congress not to act in the interests of the people. Action needs to take place now. And it can be done by enlisting the members of the medical profession, doctors, nurses, and other care providers who are being crushed/squeezed/ stretched to their limits by the uinsatiable greed of the insurance industry. But we the people have to get on board as well.
Why? Because as bad as it is, it will get worse- codex discussions, BigPharma and FDAs unholy alliance, poison drugs from China, forced vaccinations with dangerous vaccines- all this and more ae coming our way if we don’t do something now.
Judith & Jim,
Whew, I completely understand what you went through. I have had to play this ‘game’ of ‘tricking’ the business process to produce a different result. This to me is more about business processes and procedures and human beings being so attached to the process that they are not able to see anything else – and you know, they are measured by the process; so much so that the purpose is lost in all the bureaucracy.
And having to deal with that during times of distress or illness is a travesty.
There is a fine line between caring and business and more often than not, service is lost in business. This post has jolted me to look at my skill set and how I can assist businesses to re-connect to the care of their clients and customers while managing their business. Ideas anyone?
Darshana Hawks
Darshana@CoachonDemand.com
http://www.CoachonDemand.com
Alex,
RE: insurance companies — I watched the frustrations Judith went through as a Clinical Psychologist, because the insurance companies were dictating the way she could practice. I watched her go from a therapeutic artist with brilliant results to a practitioner who resisted the system until she ultimately left it.
It was all about money — the GOD we worship in this culture. The bottom line has become the only value evicting care, connection, consciousness, and conscience.
That’s why we’re so dedicated to Soft Sell, heart-based, soul-deep marketing — from people to people not ledger sheet to ledger sheet.
We’ve been told we’re not living in reality. My questions is — which reality is preferable? One that has become so mechanized that the human element is not only absent, it’s considered touchy-feely, and ridiculed as being naive? Or a reality in which the human connection is at the center of how we relate to one another?
We’re very proud of this blog because of people like you and everyone else who are willing to participate and speak your minds.
Because It Is All in the Connection,
Jim for Judith & Jim
Darshana –
Thank you for your wonderfully conscious perspective re: on bringing caring back into business. That’s why Jim and I are so committed to doing everything we can to bring “Bridging Heart and Marketing” to the larger business world!
We’re so glad you are part of the Soft Sell Marketing Community.
Judith
http://www.fearofbeingfabulous.com
Judith and Jim,
I am truly sorry to hear about your (mis)experience with the esteemed medical profession. It was an episode in “mangled care”, I mean “managed care”. I read your note a while ago and wrote a very lengthy response. Then I figure that was exactly the problem in medicine. The regulatory agencies require so much paperwork. You have no idea. The insurance companies have cut back reimbersments that really can’t sustain a practice without forming big groups and running them like a mill. (In and out, in and out). I have seen nurses and doctors spend hours trying to get needed procedure, treatments, equipment for their pts. (The hoops the ins co require).
I have been in nursing for almost 40 years. I have met a few folks who are in it for the money. Most of us are here because ii is our vocation. We long to help people get and stay healthy. The system can beat you down and many are just trying to get thru the day.
I recently moved to a new state, which means I have a new job. I went from home care to hospice. I have discovered a new level of required documentation and meetings. The patient is why we are here and they seem to be the last on the list. I do healing work and have incorporated it as part of my practice for many years. It is very difficult to include this in a visit as there are many time constraints. However, I do work to be of a benifical presence to all I care for. To me, that is being 100% present duing the visit. That is why I like home care. In the home, there are not a dozen other people pulling on you, distracting you. You know, the tryanny of the urgent.
I hope that your issue is resolved. You provide a wonderful service to those of us trying to brake free from the health care system and yet still be of service. Thanks. Mary Pat
Mary Pat – Your heartfelt care for the people you serve comes clearly through what you wrote. Thank you for sharing your gift with us all.
We trust that a new day in medicine and commerce of all kinds is indeed opening up – where meetings are not the point – caring help IS!
We appreciate you being part of the Bridging Heart and Marketing soft sell community and look forward to hearing from you in the future.
Judith Sherven
http://www.softtopiccopywritingsecrets.com