When you wear scrubs at work

I always felt a distance creep in between me and my patients when I put on my formal dress of a shirt and tie with the doctor's coat on top. The court would put a guard between me and them if they had difficulty coming forth with their anguish and complaints. Changing to scrubs helped—with no mark of identification on you, the interchange became fluid and cordial—more like between friends—and that's when the true history came out—about their disease, their suffering, and how it was affecting them both physically and mentally. It was easy to treat them physically but tough to mend their scarred psyche. It altered my ego also—it just vanished—and it became a pleasure listening to them and helping them out. Although I had a hidden agenda, I believed in karma—the good you do to others comes back to you in a different way, albeit. And it does—the book of debit and credit in life gets balanced in this lifetime. The ease of working with scrubs was heavenly; it was during the COVID times when the sartorial transition took place that we would change into scrubs once we reached the hospital and back to our clothes when coming back home so as not to bring the virus back. And the practise persisted. For us, it was so much comfort, and for the patient, the communication barrier went down. We could talk freely about their disease and their social lives. Actually, every patient who walks through your door has a story to tell. So sit back, relax, and listen to their story. A man with vitiligo is not bothered about his skin ailment; he is more bothered about his ostracization from society. When he does not see the doctor's coat, the wall falls, and he has tonnes of tales to tell. You listen—you learn. The patient with a single patch of psoriasis has so much anguish lying beneath the skin that wearing an innocuous scrub puts him at ease, and you can look into his private world and give a holistic treatment. A teenager with acne scars is depressed because of his scars; the skin creams are his last priority; it is his scarred psyche that needs mending. The scrub scrubs out the friction with the patient. As you take down the scrub and head for home, you let out a contented sigh. When you take down your scrub, unlike a doctor's coat, there is no shedding of ego, as a scrub has only empathy attached to it.