how many are you guys work as medical doctor

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Just want to know if there is other fellow Aspie here who choose to pursue a career as medical professional, and how you cope with the fact that it necessitate you to constantly meet and work with people. As for me, overall, i don't have much difficulties talking with patients (sometimes i do have hard time and do some push my self up a little on the beginning), but when it comes to building long term professional and casual relationship with people on workplace like with nurses, superiors, and other hospital personnel (which is i consider necessary in order to build a good working environment as well as to maintain fluidity of work flow), it becomes very hard for me.
So, if you are a physician and happen to be an Aspie, it would be very nice if you could share your experiences here on how you can survive in work place while living with this condition.

My oldest brother is a medical doctor. I don't know if he would qualify as an Aspie but he does share a lot of the traits. When he was small he was called "the little professor" and tormented at school. He is almost 60 now. He is not naturally social but knows how to be cordial. He has been successful (he's never been in private practice) because of his innovation and his ability to hyper focus. His specialty was neonatology but now he is a Captain in Navy medicine.

In general, successful people are not allowed to be diagnosed. If you can survive all that schooling and everything involved in the profession, you're not going to rock the boat. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Such a person would probably never be diagnosed or, if he were, would never 'fess up. Admitting to something like that would be professional suicide.

"Dr. R" was one in a series of shrinks I saw before I caught onto the concept of Asperger's and my self-diagnosis. He seemed ok, but he reminded me so much of my father that I had to ditch him and move on. He is so obviously an Aspie that, after I figured it out, I expected that he would know something about it; that he would "get it" when others don't.

I went back recently, hoping for a formal diagnosis. No such luck. "Dr. R" appeared to know nothing at all. He's either in such deep denial that he can't hear or think straight, or he just doesn't want to admit it.

With respect, I disagree. Many so-called 'successful' people are diagnosed, and I count myself in their number.

The salvation for me was children's theatre. It was there that I learned to control my instrument (voice, and movement), and it was there that I learned how two people interact with each other.

My diagnosis came after a crisis in my professional career, and perhaps I might have carried on in blissful ignorance but for that event. However, that rather ties into the diagnostic criterion that AS must demonstrate an impact on day-to-day functioning.

There's a psychiatrist on YouTube with hundreds of videos who claims to have "a little" bit of Asperger's. His YouTube name is DOCTOROFMINDMD. I find his videos to be charmingly humorous at times; I have to admit I've become a big fan. Maybe you will grow fond of him, too.

I tried to post a link to his video entitled "Asperger's Disorder" but WrongPlanet is not allowing me to post links just yet (Emu Egg). But I'm sure you could find it on your own, provided you're interested enough. Hope this was helpful in some way.

thanks for all your reply guys, but it seems we haven't yet see other real aspies doctor here to give an opinion on this.

I felt lonely my one year teaching high school math. Even though you have colleagues, you don't really engage in joint projects and you can't celebrate together.

Working at H&R Block, it's not that different, you're face-to-face with a client, and I might be the only financial person the client sees all year long, I seemed to take the job MUCH more seriously than most of my co-workers. For starters, I thought we had to inform the clients applying for loans about cross-collection (that the bank might take the entire refund for purposes of third-party debt collection! It doesn't happen often, maybe 1 client out of 100, but it is devastating when it happens). I think one thing is that most people don't believe something merely written down, unless they see it with their own eyes and maybe a coupe of times at that.

One guy thought it was predatory lending and awful, but then he waffled and thought people should follow up with their credit cards, at least find out what's going on even if they can't pay it (the whole thing is so vague it may apply to credit card debt, it may not. A June 30, 2006, publication by the IRS Taxpayer Advocate talked about it applying presumably to only previous "Refund Anticipation Loans" where Bank A collects for Bank B. I'm not so sure. The thing we ask people to sign is so vague . . . )

So, all this intellectual stuff, you see how it probably doesn't connect me to my coworkers!

My third year I felt comfortable enough showing the new office manager the part in the paperwork I most objected to. Some back and forth and he grudgingly went along with my informing clients. It was better than that, I handled it well and he responded well, and I responded to him acting in a winning manner. Later on, he admired that I really liked to stand up for the underdog. And he realized that I saved him from a fair number of complaints (not from the cross-collection, which again is rare), but from people not getting the loans when they have a perfectly good tax return. That is very common. The person's feeling is that they've paid all this money, including for the tax prep . . . and we don't give them a straight answer, and we should have told them in advance. And oftentimes, admittedly, "we" don't. But I do!

So, a fair amount of mutual respect between me and this new manager. But not really colleagues because we're not really fighting the same battle.

And connections with my co-workers, didn't really happen.

I don't know any with an official dx but my wife worked for a dentist about 20 years ago who, in retrospect, seemed to have an awful lot of AS traits. In addition, my son's psychiatrist also seems to have many AS traits.

I am a nurse, and can tell you that health care does not like its workers to be disabled. There is an unspoken law that to care for others, you must be perfectly healthy. This may be why, if there are healthcare workers with AS, they stay in the closet. I can't tell anybody I work with about my diagnosis.

In terms of dealing with people constantly, it's very challenging to say the least. After so many years of doing it, I have learned how to do it appropriately, but it hasn't been easy. It's been a lot of trial and error. It helped that the first place I worked at was a county hospital that didn't care about customer service.

My favorite patients are comatose

With medical students and training programs, I understand that there are really ridiculous ideas about "strength." For example, someone gets the flu and gets dehydrated, that person is considered to be "weak."

Seems like it could use a healthy dose of Zen realism!

Okay, the other danger sign with flu (and please excuse me, swine flu has become one of my keen interests, I sure you know far more than I do): If you start to have any trouble breathing, you want to hit it with the Tamiflu. As WHO's Dr. Nikki Shindo said in a Nov. 12th press conference: " . . . And for severe cases, don't worry about whether within 48 hours but in any stage of severe illness they can start treatment. . . "
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/vpc_tran ... shindo.pdf


And for younger people starting out, besides seeing patients full time, people can also pursue medical research, either with an MD or a Ph.D. And there are also jobs as medical journalists or medical illustrator.