He truly reminds me of some doctors that I have worked with. For instance, I started a feeding program to help teach some of the recovering stroke victims at the nursing home how to eat again. It was my job and something that I did as a matter of course, not a brand new idea in the field of occupational therapy. Well the doctor was amazed that people began to gain weight (duh!), their overall health got better (again duh!) and the bedsores that old people seem to be plagued with began to disappear. My concern was that these patients be able to live as fulfilling lives as possible and eating is a big part of living. Feeding ones self and being able to taste and then swallow the food are big parts of eating. My job was to figure out how to make it possible for them. How they could regain some mastery of this part of their lives.

The doctor on his own, went and got a grant to study the affects of adequate nutrition on bedsores. Then he imposed himself on our already happening feeding program and made it into his feeding program, with his own goals and disregarded the initial purpose of the program. The program the way I ran it dealt with maybe at the most 7 patients and only at lunch, the meal I was at work for. The team included myself, the nutritionalist and one other person, I can't remember who. At the end of the 4 weeks the patient would be feeding themself and be happily enjoying mealtimes with their friends.

Now what the doctor did was insist that we turn this into a facility wide program and every patient that was a few pounds under weight would be included, even the extremely demented ones with alzheimers. He wanted his results and didn't care about what we already had going. He made everyone that was free during the lunch hour, (even those on their lunch breaks) come down and force feed any patient that wasn't shoveling food in their mouths fast enough. NOT the relaxed enjoyable meal times we had been going for! The patients hated the meal times, the other staff really hated the occupational therapy staff, nobody wanted to give up their breaks for nothing and work became a really unhappy place for awhile. The way the doctor wanted the program ran would included every meal, and every staff member except himself. He just sat back and wrote his paper and raked in the grant money.

Eventually he got his written results and the final check in the mail and then the program was allowed to slowly disappear into the woodwork. I am no longer a therapist but the feeding program the way I ran it was one of my prides and joys at work. I knew all about the adaptive equipment, the disabilities with swallowing, how to retrain someone to eat, how to make meals fun and food to taste good (salt and sugar baby, or maybe some lemon juice). I loved being a therapist but it was hard to have to kowtow to the doctors when they didn't have the faintest idea of what we were really about and they were the ones with the power.