One of the things that happens when you work in healthcare, is that you meet a lot of people. When you also work in small towns with transient populations, you meet even more. That means, that when you’ve been around for a while, many of the people that you know come from very different ideological places – be that health, religion/spirituality, politics, family values, or even their preferred types of music.

But when you work in health, you also know a lot of other people who also work in health.

Recently, in social media, there’s been an uptick in memes, comments, and commentary around healthcare. Some of it’s driven by the ‘interesting’ appointments of unqualified persons to high office in positions directly affecting healthcare in the US. Some of it’s the ongoing background noise of a small, but very vocal minority of people who are in the anti-vaccination space, and who were given a platform during the lockdown phases of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But suffice it to say, I regularly encounter moments when I have to say firmly to myself: “Step away from the keyboard, Leonie. You’re not going to convince them otherwise.” Clearly, this is not one of those times.

I saw yesterday, a post on social media, liked and shared, and reposted multiple times, that really, really irritated me. Maybe even made me angry. I won’t post it, but the gist was that all mainstream healthcare providers are in it for the money, and that they effectively get rich because they like to keep people sick and injured.

I am a mainstream healthcare provider. I’m not a doctor or a nurse, or a pharmacist, I’m a physiotherapist. But my profession works with doctors, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, pathologists, radiographers, and researchers. I know many people in those professions. I am working in mainstream healthcare.

Not one that I know personally, wants to keep anyone sick or injured. We’ve all spent years at university learning. We’ve all spent subsequent decades doing ongoing professional development (usually in our own time), every single year of our careers. We upskill as required, and we expand our knowledge base on a regular basis. And not because we want to gain more money, or perpetuate illness or injury, but because we genuinely want to make people better.

The greatest joy you can have in a health profession, is to see someone who you first saw sick or injured, leave your place of work healthy and/or rehabilitated. And you hope that they never have to return. While I don’t routinely save peoples’ lives, I do routinely teach people to walk again, and rehabilitate them from a variety of injuries. I diagnose and treat. And I do it backed by evidence. And when the evidence improves, my colleagues and I change our practice accordingly.

While there is no-one who suggests that everyone who works in mainstream health is pure as the driven snow – because that would be impossible, and there are bad actors in any profession, I can tell you that the vast majority of health professionals frequently take their work home so that they can be better at their job. They think about their tricky patients. They look up recent trials. They do courses, hoping that they’ll be able to offer their patients better care.

So when someone posts a derogatory meme or comment about the way they think about the generalised motivations (my motivations) of healthcare professionals, it hurts. The person who posts it (usually from a position of ignorance, or an inflated view of their own understanding), has effectively walked up to a person they know who works in health care and said:

“I know you just do it for the money. Oh, and by the way, we know you like us sick and injured so you can make money.”

“We know you intentionally harm us to make money.”

“Oh, and by the way, we know you get kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies to do so.”

I’d like to ask those who post such things – would you actually say that face to face to a friend? Have you ever thought about how your healthcare friends feel when you repost something like that on social media?

I suspect not, but if they have, then I wonder what they really think about their friends…