Skip to main content

Disabled Doctor Speaks Up

 |  By jfellows@healthleadersmedia.com  
   October 09, 2014

An emergency medicine physician recounts her personal experience with stuttering to advocate for more compassion, training, and equitable treatment of patients who have a disability.

When physicians are faced with caring for a patient with a disability, they may be overlooking the most important aspect of treatment: respect for the patient.


Leana Wen, MD

It's ironic that physicians contribute to the inadequate treatment of people with mental and/or physical disabilities because the doctor's office is often where disabilities are initially diagnosed, or at least cared for, and there is some patient expectation that behaviors, such as avoiding eye contact, will not be encountered.

An essay published in this month's issue of Health Affairs, Leana Wen, MD, director of patient-centered care research and assistant professor of emergency medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, recounts her personal experience with stuttering to advocate for more compassion, training, and equitable treatment of patients who have a disability.

Wen spoke with me about the additional challenges patients face when they have a disability and what physicians can do to overcome their fears of caring for someone who is physically and or mentally disabled.

HLM: In your essay, you write that it wasn't until the end of medical school that you decided to be open about stuttering. What led to that decision?

Wen: Of course I knew that I stuttered, but I thought that if I were open about it, that people would see me as incompetent and not able to perform, and I wouldn't be able to realize my dream of being a doctor, so I hid it.

Usually, I would say nothing about it at all. It wasn't until I was a medical student that I realized I needed and sought treatment for it. Speaking up about stuttering is something my speech therapist and I talked about.

HLM: What did it feel like to speak up for yourself, once you decided to be open about your stuttering?

Wen: One of the first times I did was when I was a medical student. Somebody was brought into the emergency room for a suspected stroke because the triage nurse said, "He can't speak." I saw what she meant, he was really struggling to speak.

But his behavior I knew well, and in fact, he wasn't having a stroke. He was there for something totally unrelated, like abdominal pain, but because he was having trouble getting out his words, the providers thought he was having a stroke.

It was so frightening for me to admit that I stuttered, but it was such a breath of fresh air because I was able to help a patient.

HLM: You advocate for the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Accreditation Council for Graduation Medical Education, and others to incorporate caring for people with disabilities into curriculum. What can physicians and other medical staff do to ensure the equitable treatment of patients with a disability?

Wen: It's being able to first address people with disabilities with appropriate language, then showing respect and having some understanding of the difficulties and challenges of the disability, but getting beyond the disabilities to treat the patients.

Often providers will see a patient in a wheelchair and think, "This is going to be a difficult patient," and won't undress them, or will delay seeing them. These are things that as physicians we would normally do.

Providers have a tendency to say, "This is going to take a lot more time, and we don't have time to talk, so we're just going to order a bunch of tests." If a patient doesn't speak English, we don't say that we won't see them. We get them an interpreter and help them. Why don't we treat patients with disabilities this way?

HLM: What kind of training would help physicians and medical staff?

Wen: There was a study done that 25% of offices don't even see patients with disabilities. It takes others pointing out that disparities exist.

I am also a firm believer that things have to be continually fostered. That behavior has to be modeled in residency. It can be taught. I strongly believe that.

There are wide variations in training. We learn about treatments that may benefit many, but nearly 20% of the population has a physical or mental disability, and many medical schools don't have anything about treating patients with a disability.

Part of it is time, another part of it is that this softer side of medicine is getting lost in technology. We've gotten so far away from what it means to be healers.

I think role modeling is key. I don't think it happens organically. You can give people all these statistics, but they're not really going to know the impact… we have to be very conscious that we are addressing the needs of people with disabilities. It's not just talking about people with disabilities, but we have to be conscious about what we're doing.

Jacqueline Fellows is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.

Tagged Under:


Get the latest on healthcare leadership in your inbox.