TRAUMATIZED DOCTORS AND PERSECUTION THROUGH GENERAL MEDICAL COUNCIL

Doctors witness traumatic events in their working lives. This would mean that there should be a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in doctors. Read this article by a psychiatrist on PTSD in doctors: http://familydoctor.org/online/famdocen/home/common/mentalhealth/anxiety/624.html But there is more than that. Doctors suffer more harassment and from many sources. The implications are that some doctors would have even higher risk of developing different symptoms of PTSD. For example avoidance of stress inducing events, reminders of those events but also hyper vigilance are all symptoms of PTSD. The implications are very serious in cases where hyper vigilance can lead to over diagnosis of some problems in patients. There are extremely emotional issues such as child abuse, for example, and professionals involved in child protection may get a very bad deal when it comes to how they are protected by their profession. PTSD could be wrongly labelled as attitudinal problem, for example. Doctors and lawyers know how important it is to give accurate diagnosis in all people including doctors. Yet, psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD has social and political implications as well as legal implications. There may be a tendency to avoid recognizing this in doctors who come before General Medical Council because emotions are running high and also because of the prejudice such as gender bias still prevalent in medical and legal profession. It is known that the same fictional patient case can get different psychiatric diagnosis when gender is changed. It is a mistake to consider that those who have PTSD need just medical treatment because it cannot address injustice, social causes, bad politics or indifference. Both medical and legal profession are dominated by men who judge others according to their own experiences or according to what is learned to be allowed to be perceived about themselves and others. There is extensive literature, for example, on sexual harassment and PTSD as well as how legal and medical system deals with it. Please, see this book pages by clicking on pages arrow on the site: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pTpiA4mOuE4C&pg=PA180&lpg=PA180&dq=ptsd++gold&source=bl&ots=feecGqugRI&sig=KhgwhQTOskKGdLQmaNEVbWzJWKs&hl=en&ei=CLJ8SpOUEdHw-Qbh3YRC&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=ptsd%20%20gold&f=false And this about sexual harassment of male doctors: http://ukpmc.ac.uk/pagerender.cgi?artid=601880&pageindex=1 And this about sexual harassment of female doctors: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8247058 The General Medical Council has to deal with these gender bias issues sooner rather than later. It is in the interest of patients and public as well as the General Medical Council which has suffered considerable damage as the result of sexists experts it employed.