Why It’s Important for My Patients to Know I’m a Doctor SAEM PULSE | MARCH-APRIL 2021
By Anita Chary, MD, PhD
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As a female physician it’s essentially a rite of passage to have a patient mistake you for a nurse, a technician, or another type of non-physician role. Despite introducing myself as “Dr. Chary” in every encounter, patients still mistake me for a nurse or someone in a non-clinical role. My female attending mentors, decades into their clinical careers, tell me that this experience does not go away over time — even if you wear a white coat, sport a “DOCTOR” badge, and hand out business cards with your professional title.
Early in residency I found this experience frustrating. When I expressed misgivings about being confused for a non-physician, my colleagues’ first assumption was that I was offended that my years of education and personal sacrifice were being disregarded. To some degree, that was true, but it felt less about me specifically and more about being a woman in medicine facing daily sexism: I found the pervasiveness of implicit gender bias tiring. We’ve been socially conditioned to imagine physicians as males — often white males — and when someone’s
appearance deviates from that, it simply doesn’t fit into our doctor schema. We’ve also been socially conditioned to imagine women in caregiving roles. Indeed, throughout residency, some of my colleagues encouraged me to reframe role confusion as a compliment. Nurses tend to provide patients with emotional support and care, isn’t it nice that patients associate you, as a woman, with that? Early on in residency, as patients mistook me over and over again for a non-physician, I quickly came to realize that offense was not actually at the heart of this experience for me.
