If you've been in practice for a few years, you've probably felt upset by how you're treated by some attorneys and insurance companies. You've been frustrated and angry. You've had money owed to you that's difficult, if not impossible, to collect.
Attorneys and insurance companies aren't deadbeat patients. You expect responsible, prompt, courteous, and respectful treatment from professionals in the business world. Instead you get phone calls not returned; delays and blocks are put in your way. You have to twist arms.
The lawyers and insurance companies don't do what they're supposed to do. They take advantage of you. They abuse their position of power over you.
Hurt and frustrated by what's being done to you, you feel like hitting back. That's human nature, a natural response. How you act on these feelings depends on many things.
Sometimes you don't want to bite the hand that feeds you, not obviously anyway. You don't confront the person or situation and communicate the difficult issues directly. Sometimes a few bitter words, preferably not to the person who's making you angry, can make you feel better.
But when the situation is repeated again and again, the feelings build up. Without making a conscious choice to start, you can find yourself doing the same things you find reprehensible. You're acting out.
You're doing it to others like they've done it to you. You're doing it to others before they can do it to you. It's easy to slip down the slippery slope of loose ethics.
Within a few years you've become what you hate. The feelings twist and turn within you, distorting you. Feeling you don't recognize or admit can make you lie, cheat, and steal.
Many people can't admit they've become what they hate, even to themselves. If you're male, you're likely to have an even bigger problem because of the way you've been socialized. From the time you were small, you lived in a dichotomous world. There are winners and losers. The good guys and the bad guys. The hero and the villain. It's kill or be killed.
A part of male socialization is to learn to think of yourself in the part of the hero. When you're a hero you're always right, and everything can be justified. It can become an unconscious mechanism that can make it easy to deny angry feelings and unethical behavior.
Women's early socialization doesn't give them this easy way out of admitting to themselves that they're doing things to others that they know are wrong. Women "play house," practicing interactions of relationship, caring, communication. Playing house is not a situation of kill or be killed.
When the reality of adult life presents challenging situations that make women feel angry, their unconscious socialized response is not likely to be scripting "kill or be killed." If women act out their hostile feeling in ways that make them become what they hate, it isn't likely that they will also have the additional problems of denial through a strongly internalized hero script.
Our professional ethos feeds into the problem by encouraging our professional self-images to be that we are victims of the system, who are really heroes. A related problem is the way we lightly and euphemistically refer to lying, cheating, and stealing as overutilization, overbilling, and fraud.
Let's communicate more directly in 1994. Let's not justify lying, cheating, and stealing in these ways anymore. When you deny that you hate what you've become, how can you change? There's no motivation to fix something that you can't see is broken.
Dr. Richard Vincent, the respected former president of the Society of Chiropractic Management Consultants, wrote in 1992, "The demands of the '90s will not tolerate anything but the highest order of ethics and professionalism ... Values cannot be overstated. Leave the practice builder concept behind. It is obsolete."1
Reference
1. Vincent R. Sound business management is essential to quality chiropractic. Calif. Chiro. Assoc. Journal, May 1992.
Linda S. Elyad, DC
Phoenix, Arizona
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