[skore]

I do understand you're not reading the replies and I'm trying to not make the same mistake that you did, so I'm not responding to the emotional content (which I could, at length, in kind) of your message, but what I think is the meat of your misunderstanding.

I find it odd that you're focussing on making people understand that many in your profession care. It has been my experience that most health care providers… care.

Let's suppose that health care is like any other profession - let's say it's just like programming, something most people understand deeply on here.

We all know programmers who care and programmers who don't care. The best programmers I know are the ones who care, are competent, but also able and willing to have their understanding of the subject matter challenged. They're not married to their craft - they keep the right distance to excel at it.

The worst ones I know are those who care just as much, but are utterly incompetent. The ones who are so deep into it that they literally cannot see any other way. To them, everything is clear and obvious. They're willing, enthusiastic and overjoyed to be working. And they're wrong. There is not a codebase they touch where every hour of work they put in produces ten or twenty times as much work for others, later on.

I think caring about your craft is a force multiplier and it's a necessary one. You don't want a mindless drone who doesn't give a damn about either your health or your codebase, no matter how competent they are. To care means to have a vital part of you engaged in such a way that all that you could bring to the table does get there. But it has to be lightly held and accepting of being challenged.

You care. I get it. But that doesn't mean everybody cares. (Again, really struggling here to not respond in kind with examples of people I have met who clearly did not care.) And even if everybody did care - some people are actually more useless the more they care.

But - it's up to the customers (or patients) to navigate that landscape. There has to be a mutual understanding that all parties involved are just human and can make mistakes. Our understanding of health care moves forward and things that are standard care today had to be invented, sometimes just a few years ago, often replacing things that used to be just as firmly a standard, before. Challenging what is accepted practice should be a healthy part of this interaction.

There's a limit to how many people care. There is a limit to how useful it is that people care. There is a limit to how effective you can be for your patients when you walk around with a chip on your shoulder, thinking that people just don't get how much you care.