Medicine is full of uncertainty, and there are always going to be complications and patients who have bad outcomes. Bad things do happen to other doctors, and how we respond to them is a reflection of our maturity. Some of us take perverse delight when another doctor has a patient who suffers a complication. We treat our colleagues as competitors and are happy when they run into difficulty.
We take pride in bad-mouthing the other doctor and pointing out his deficiencies and limitations, without trying to empathize , or understand what went wrong and why. It's very easy to be critical and wise after the event, but this is the root cause of how we cause harm to each other. When we criticize what the earlier doctor did, the patient starts getting vengeful and angry. This might give us a few minutes of fleeting pleasure , because we've played the game of one-upmanship successfully, and…
