Before you tell the ‘truth’ to the patient, be sure you know the ‘truth’ and that the patient wants to hear it.--Chinese saying
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This anecdote is from a few years ago. A patient of mine that I was consulting on had a life-threatening infectious disease that requires 6 weeks of antibiotics. The decision for the duration of antibiotics wasn’t made by myself since I do not specialize in infectious diseases, but I did fully agree to it. Unfortunately, if he were to get the whole course of antibiotics, he would miss a cruise that he had planned a year before, and he did not have travel insurance. His wife convinced him to stay home for the antibiotics, and he made a full recovery.
When I saw him incidentally in the hallway of the hospital a bit later, I said, “Looks like you’re doing well! I’m glad you followed Dr. X’s advice to get the antibiotics.” He said without any hint of irony in his voice, “Yeah, but I don’t like Dr. X. He made me miss my cruise.”
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Where I’m located, COVID-19 hasn’t hit very hard, so all we get are numbers reported to us daily by the governor. While some people are following the stay-at-home advice, others on my FB feed keep posting things like “this is unconstitutional that they’re taking our livelihood from us!” and “you’ll see lots of deaths from suicides and depression soon!” They all know about the massacre in NYC and Italy, but they’re not seeing it in their daily lives. Some of them are skirting the “essential vs non-essential” businesses and working at their shops. Some have gotten warnings but there is no enforcement of the stay-at-home rule by the whole state.
While I hope we will never see the terrible numbers coming out from NYC, I do think a lot of people who are lucky enough to have been in a state where stay-at-home orders were issued relatively early will NOT appreciate how they might have been dying a painful death in the hospital right now were it not for the order. Granted, to have no income for 2 months is much worse than missing a cruise, but their emphasis is not how one had skirted disaster but the lost economy and morale.
This is the reason why I think a lot of people will still vote for Trump. Most of them will not see the death and suffering prevented, only that their livelihood was threatened by quarantine and the “medical coma” forced on the economy to save lives.