Bullying in the medical profession is common, particularly of student or trainee physicians. It is thought that this is at least in part an outcome of conservative traditional hierarchical structures and teaching methods in the medical profession which may result in a bullying cycle.
According to Field, bullies are attracted to the caring professions, such as medicine, by the opportunities to exercise power over vulnerable clients, employees and students.
While the stereotype of a victim as a weak person who somehow deserves to be bullied is salient, there is growing evidence that bullies, who are often driven by jealousy and envy, pick on the highest performing and most skilled students, whose mere presence is sufficient to make the bully feel insecure. The victim are usually high academic achievers and are likely to have been top of the class throughout their school years. As medical students have to compete against each other, this can make certain trainee doctors eager to stand out from the crowd, and some use underhand techniques to gain academic recognition.
The rampant problem of medical student mistreatment and bullying was systematically studied and reported in a 1990 JAMA study by pediatrician Henry K. Silver which found that 46.4 percent of students at one medical school had been abused at some point during medical school; by the time they were seniors, that number was 80.6 percent.
In a 2002 test, 594 BMA members were randomly selected to complete a bullying survey, and 220 of the 594 junior doctors reported having been bullied in the previous year. This survey reported no variance in job grade or age.
Psychology
Threats (of exposure of inadequacy) must be ruthlessly controlled and subjugated. Psychological models such as transference and projection have been proposed to explain such behaviors, wherein the bully's sense of personal inadequacy is projected or transferred to a victim; through making others feel inadequate and subordinate, the bully thus vindicates their own sense of inferiority.
Displacement is another defense mechanism that can explain the propensity of many medical educators to bully students, and may operate subconsciously. Displacement entails the redirection of an impulse (usually aggression) onto a powerless substitute target. The target can be a person or an object that can serve as a symbolic substitute. Displacement can operate in chain-reactions, wherein people unwittingly become at once victims and perpetrators of displacement. For example, a resident physician may be undergoing stress with her patients or at home, but cannot express these feelings toward patients or toward her family members, so she channels these negative emotions toward vulnerable students in the form of intimidation, control or subjugation. The student then acts brashly toward a patient, channeling reactive emotions which cannot be directed back to the resident physician onto more vulnerable subjects.
Beyond its ramifications for victims, disrespect and bullying in medicine is a threat to patient safety because it inhibits collegiality and cooperation essential to teamwork, cuts off communication, undermines morale, and inhibits compliance with and implementation of new practices.
Bullying cycle
Medical training usually takes place in institutions that have a highly structured hierarchical system, and has traditionally involved teaching by intimidation and humiliation. Such practices may foster a culture of bullying and the setting up of a cycle of bullying, analogous to other cycles of abuse in which those who experience it go on to abuse others when they become more senior. Medical doctors are increasingly reporting to the British Medical Association that they are being bullied, often by older and more senior colleagues, many of whom were badly treated themselves when more junior.
Physician Jonathan Belsey relates in an emblematic narrative published in AMA Virtual Mentor entitled Teaching By Humiliation that "however well you presented the case, somewhere along the line you would trip up and give the predatory professor his opportunity to expose your inadequacies. Sometimes it would be your lack of medical knowledge; sometimes the question that you failed to ask the patient that would have revealed the root of the problem, or sometimes your ineptitude at eliciting the required clinical signs. On one memorable occasion, when I had appeared to cover all the bases clinically, the professor turned to me and berated me for attending his ward round wearing a plaid shirt that was clearly inappropriate for an aspiring doctor."