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Is It Time for Doctors to Ditch the White Coat? First Impressions in Health Care



Is It Time for Doctors to Ditch the White Coat? First Impressions in Health Care

You go to the doctor and he or she walks into the room with that clinical white coat. How does that effect their first impression? And how does that effect you as the patient. You may know that I speak on body language and patient care so I particularly interested in the latest research on doctors white coats.


Is it time for doctors to ditch the white coat?
The traditional uniform is causing more problems than you think


Anyone who has considered medicine as a career imagines walking into a white, clean exam room with the power to comfort and heal the sick. To add to this angelic fantasy, we do not forget to imagine ourselves wearing a freshly laundered white coat bearing what only many years of arduous education and sleepless nights can provide: First name, last name, M.D.
The white coat is a badge of perseverance, intelligence, empowerment, and authority — for new interns, a reassurance that they have what it takes to take care of the life of another. But this Victorian symbol of purity and sanitation may soon go the way of the lobotomy.
I recently returned from an interview at Mayo Clinic, where I was surprised to see so many business suits. As one of the world's meccas for medicine and health care, I expected a place that resembled, well, a hospital. Instead I encountered what appeared to be a fancy hotel with a curiously large number of wheelchairs.
The rationale behind the white coat restriction makes sense given Mayo's dedication to providing the best for patient care and comfort. The organization's philosophy: The white coat builds a barrier between patient and physician, increasing the chances for the patient to feel anxious.
And Mayo patients seem to like it. Surveys have found that patients felt most comfortable when physicians wore scrubs, followed by semi-formal/business attire, then followed last by white coats. In order to maintain its high standards of professionalism, Mayo went with the suit and eschewed the white coat. (The only ones who can wear white coats in public are those in scrubs coming from or going to the OR.)
In a separate 2005 report published in the British Medical Journal, researchers found that patients preferred doctors wearing semiformal attire — defined as dark pants and long-sleeved shirt with a tie for men, and dark-colored skirts or pants with a blouse for women. Those ensembles beat out the white coat, formal wear, and casual attire.
Mayo is not alone in recognizing the symbolic power of the white coat. As Jean-Phillip Okhovat, a UCLA medical student, puts it, "I think the white coat creates an immediate sense of hierarchy. Not wearing a white coat makes it less intimidating for the parent and child."
In psychiatry, the white coat can not only add to this patient-physician barrier, but also become a target of aggression for patients with a history of troubled visits to the doctor. Yang Yu, a University of California, Irvine, medical student, recalls, "Mentally ill patients can perceive the white coat as a threat. There have been instances of people in white coats who were attacked."
Inevitably, when the topic of white coats comes up, the issue of spreading infections is never far away. Even as someone who works in health care, the white coat can sometimes make me cringe. I have no idea how many hundreds of patients that coat rubbed up against, and sometimes I can tell that the coat has not been washed in weeks. The gloves get changed, the paper on the examination bed gets rolled out, and copious amounts of hand sanitizer are used, but none of that may matter if the biggest culprit is right on the doctor's clothes.
In one study, researchers found that doctor's white coats were contaminated with all kinds of bacteria, including Staphylococci resistant to penicillin, erythromycin, and clindamycin. The worst areas were the sides of the white coat, the cuffs, collars, and pockets.
The National Health Service in the U.K. has already banned the use of long-sleeved white coats, and instead adopted a "bare below the elbows" rule to reduce unnecessary infections. The NHS also requires that doctors leave their uniforms at the workplace, where it is regularly laundered to reduce cross-contamination. This policy has already shown a marked reduction in infections. (I should mention, however, that despite evidence showing that white coats harbor bacteria, many professionals remain unconvinced that this makes a difference in terms of nosocomial infections.)
Every July and August of each year, recently admitted medical students don fresh white coats to symbolize the beginnings of this arduous yet rewarding journey toward becoming a physician. But the tone is changing as physicians continuously ask themselves how best to serve their patients. As Don Berwick, a Harvard Medical School professor and former Administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, put it at the commencement for the Yale School of Medicine in 2010:
Those who suffer need you to be something more than a doctor; they need you to be a healer. And to become a healer, you must do something even more difficult than putting your white coat on. You must take your white coat off.
When you take off that white coat in the sacred presence of those for whom you will care — in the sacred presence of people just like you — when you take off that white coat, and tower not over them, but join those you serve, you become a healer in the world of fear and fragmentation.

Is it time for doctors to ditch the white coat?
The traditional uniform is causing more problems than you think













Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Is Norman Bates a Realistic Psychopath? How Movies Portray Psychopaths and Psychologist Define Them



Is Norman Bates a Realistic Psychopath?
How Movies Portray Psychopaths and How Psychologist Can Use Movies to Help with a diagnosis.
I have studied the movies and the creative career of Alfred Hitchcock with a fascination that help prepare me for my TV interviews on HLN analyzing suspected Murderers. I have written extensively about narcissism and find this research fascinating. If you like the article you may want to pick up the nonfiction book The Murder Room about a real life secret society of experts who solve cold case murders. But don't, absolutely don't read the book in bed and then try to go to sleep.

Is Norman Bates a realistic psychopath?
A new study examines 400 movies to see whether Hollywood gets psychopathy right


Pycho's psycho leaves a lot to be desired.
At least that's the conclusion of a new study that tried to determine realistic portrayals of psychopathic behavior on the silver screen. According to forensic psychiatrists Samuel Leistedt and Paul Linkowski, who led a team that studied hundreds of films, Norman Bates was too delusional and disconnected from reality to qualify as being a psychopath. The world's most famous mama's boy, if they had to diagnosis him, was more psychotic than psychopathic.
Bates isn't alone. Psychopathy isn't what most movies make it out to be, Leistedt and Linkowski say, and most psychos in film, especially in the medium's early days, are either caricatures or based on a poor or incomplete understanding of the disorder. And because the definition of psychopathy has changed over the years, movie psychos from one era might be diagnosed differently today.
To gauge the realism of movie psychos and see how their portrayals have evolved, Leistedt and Linkowski put together a team of forensic psychiatrists and movie critics to watch 400 movies dating from 1915 to 2010. The majority of psychopathic characters were ignored because they had magical powers, were nonhuman, or were otherwise way too unrealistic. The 126 characters that were left got a closer look from the team to find the most accurate psychopaths.
Aside from giving screenwriters and actors an idea of what they're doing right or wrong, the researchers hope that their work can be a useful teaching tool for psychology and psychiatry students. Diagnosing and recognizing psychopathy isn't easy, and very few students will get to see the real deal during their training. A library of the best movie psychos could be the next best thing — and a lot safer.
Here are a few of the movie psychopaths that the study deemed realistic, and those that were the stuff of fantasy.

Realistic psychopaths

1. Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men. The bolt pistol-toting hit man was called out for a frighteningly realistic portrayal of a damaged mind. Leistedt and Linkowski call him a "well-designed prototypical idiopathic/primary psychopath," who displays an " incapacity for love, absence of shame or remorse, lack of psychological insight, inability to learn from past experience, cold-blooded attitude, ruthlessness, total determination, and lack of empathy." Chigurh reminded them of real-life contract killers they've studied, like Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski.
2. Gordon Gekko, Wall Street. "One of the most interesting, manipulative, psychopathic fictional characters to date," say Leistedt and Linkowski. "Successful psychopaths" and "corporate psychopaths" like Gekko are getting more attention from filmmakers and clinicians alike in the wake of global economic crisis, and the researchers expect to see more figures like this pop up in both movies and newspaper headlines.
3. Henry, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The title character, inspired by real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, shows a "powerful lack of empathy, emotional poverty, and a well-illustrated failure to plan ahead" that faithfully reflects the lack of stability in a psychopath's life.
4. Hans Beckert, M. "One of the first, rarest, and more realistic" portrayals before the 1960s, the character is an "outwardly unremarkable man tormented by a compulsion to murder children ritualistically, which is a substantially more realistic depiction of what would eventually be known today as a sexually violent predator (SVP)."

A little too crazy

1. Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers and other "slashers." On the whole, slasher films stray pretty far from realistic psychopathy. Even if you ignore the supernatural elements in some of the movies, the killers' sadism and "ability to predict the plan that the future victims will use to escape" left most of them excluded from serious analysis.
2. Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs. "Lecter is an exceptionally intelligent sophisticated socialite, whose disarming charisma, erudition, civility, and wit disguise his true nature," Leistedt and Linkowski say — and that's not a combination you'll often find in the real world. Lecter is not only an unrealistic psychopath, but also a poor depiction of a psychiatrist. He's "an extraordinarily astute clinician who can diagnose Jodie Foster's psychological conflicts by identifying her perfume and assessing her shoes and clothing with Holmesian accuracy." These abilities, Leistedt and Linkowski dryly note, "are not generally found in everyday clinical practice."



Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

Improve Your Job Interviews on Skype,


How Do Your Prepare to Give and Interview via Skype


Many of my clients have asked me how to interview and give a good interview via Skype. It certainly isn't easy, but you can do it.  Prepare you room check to see what shows up on the screen. Simplify your background. Try different locations for the lighting to make you look your best. Even guys may want to use a little brush of translucent powder so you don't look sweaty on camera. Make sure you if you wear glasses that they don't have a glare bouncing off of them. Lens Crafters has nonglare lenses for an extra 40 dollars. Do a dry run of your interview with a friend. Preferably someone who isn't hyper critical. Check your connection, and sound.

during the interview notice the words that the interviewer is using and mirror them back. For example if they say, "We have a great TEAM here at EYZ company."  you can say somewhere in the interview. When I was working with the TEAM at...." or if they use a technical term a few times and you know what it means you can use it as well. This makes you sound and feel to them that you
are a good match.

Make sure you have examples of your successful contributions in previous jobs. For more tips including body language for good interviews go check out my other job interview posts.

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional a body language expert and a interview coach.
 For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

The Research Shows an Anti-redhead Prejudice in Attraction and Why I have a thing for Red Headed Men


The science behind anti-redhead prejudice and Why I have a thing for Red Headed Men

It started in Kindergarten. I saw his red hair from across the room and I was immediately smitten. I could not help myself. I wanted to be friends with Kenny Sharp. His smile and his freckles and that ginger hair did things to me. We were both four and he became my Crayola red crayon boyfriend through first and second grade and set the tone for my life long love of red headed men. Why? I think it is my Scottish heritage on my mothers side of the family we are Lochries. I think I long for my Scottish roots and few read headed children.  My proclivity for red headed men does not fall in line with the national average of what makes a man attractive. Most women spurn the advances of a read headed man. But not me. Here is the research.

The science behind anti-redhead prejudice
Studies show that people are less likely to make a move on a redheaded girl or accept the advances of a redheaded guy. Why?


Are people with red hair — gingers, redheads, individuals of unusual rufosity, whatever you want to call them — less attractive than people with other hair colors? That is certainly what received wisdom tells us. Alongside the impression that they have fiery tempers, unquenchable libidos, and cold, clammy hands (OK, I made that last one up), one of the most common bits of folk wisdom about redheads is that they are just not that cute.
Color of my love
In 2012, the journal Psychological Studies published a study that created quite a stir on this topic, and was widely reported as "bad news for redheads."
Researcher Nicolas Guéguen examined how hair color alone could influence a person's chances of scoring at a nightclub. He had women dress up in differently-colored wigs, and measured how often they were approached by men. Similarly, they had men wearing differently-colored wigs approach various women over the course of the evening, and measured how often their advances were accepted or rebuffed.
By using the same set of men and women, and changing only the apparent color of their hair, this experiment was able to separate the influence of hair color itself from other features of physical attractiveness, such as facial features, skin tone, height, and body proportions.
Just as you might expect, based on common folk-wisdom and stereotypes, women were approached most often when wearing a blonde wig and men were rejected the most often when wearing a ginger wig. The news looks pretty bad for ginger men.
Or does it? Studies have shown time and again that facial symmetry, height, and body proportions matter the most to people's immediate assessments of physical attractiveness. These are also features that are more intrinsic and harder to change or hide than hair color. If the only thing that people are responding to is the hair color itself, this may actually be good news for redheads. It means that the only thing that "turns people off" is something that's fairly easy to change.
Unfortunately, this also helps to perpetuate the stereotype that redheads are intrinsically less attractive. When so many ginger celebrities actively cover it up by coloring their hair, it only makes it more difficult for people to think of "hot gingers."
This reassures people in their belief that redheads are "usually not hot," simply because they don't know how many hot people out there really are redheads.
What about the freckles?
At this time, there isn't any evidence to suggest that gingers are less likely to have those traits that are considered "generically attractive" by the majority of the population, such as high cheekbones, symmetrical faces, and well-proportioned bodies. However, they are much more prone to having freckled skin.
Skin tone is another one of those well-studied features that has been shown to consistently have an impact on people's assessment of physical beauty: Those with clear, evenly-colored skin are widely regarded as being more attractive than people with patchy, blotchy, or freckled skin.
Nowhere is this more obvious than when looking at professional photos of redheaded models and celebrities. Even those "hot redheads" that flaunt the redness of their hair usually are made-up on magazine covers to have almost unnaturally even skin tones.
Moreover, there is a reasonable theory to explain why the bias against freckles might be more than just a cultural prejudice. Not to be too blunt about it, but freckles are cancer factories.
Let's be clear, before the hate mail starts pouring in. Some people find freckles very attractive, and that is fantastic. Not all freckles automatically lead to cancer, either. But the type of melanin that causes freckles can increase the skin's sensitivity to ultraviolet radiation and make skin more prone to getting cancer.
They therefore can serve as a quite real biological "warning sign."
In the northern latitudes, this isn't as much of a problem as when you get closer to the equator. In fact, although the gene patterns that are associated with having red hair are present in both northern and southern areas of Europe, there are many more actual redheads in the north.
Part of the reason for this is that in the south, the "redhead genes" are mixed in with more dominant genes for darker skin, so the genes that produce ginger hair do not have an opportunity to express themselves and be visible.
So there may be an evolved, adaptive response to be less attracted to people with freckles, on the grounds that they are more likely to develop skin cancer. This could also explain why celebrity redheads tend to have their freckles airbrushed away to make them look more appealing.
However, it does not explain why there still remains such a strong bias against gingers — freckled or not — especially in the northern latitudes where sun exposure is less of a problem.
Attractiveness and gene-mixing
It is also possible that both red hair and freckled skin are viewed as less attractive because they are both recessive traits. This means that the traits are easily covered up by the effects of other genes. For example, if you get genes for red hair from one parent but brown hair from another, you are likely to not have red hair yourself.
The same is true for the trademark pale, freckled skin of redheads: When mixed with the genetic codes for darker skin, the fact that the "freckles gene" is present in a person may never actually become visible.
This could be related to attractiveness because there is an evolutionary benefit to mixing genes from different groups. When a person's heritage is very mixed, there is less of a chance that a harmful recessive gene will have an opportunity to express itself.
Charles Darwin proposed this idea, calling it "heterosis:" The theory that cross-breeding across populations would lead to children that are genetically stronger than their parents.
Consistent with this theory, Dr. Michael Lewis discovered in a study that was published in 2010 that people will rate photos of individuals with mixed-ethnicity backgrounds as "very attractive" 55 percent more often than people from a single ethnic background.
What does this mean for gingers? It could be that having red hair serves as a biological cue for a lack of genetic mixing, which we have evolved to be biased against. But once again this biological theory must be interpreted with caution.
This doesn't mean that all redheads are inherently unlucky genetically and must be unattractive. But it does mean that attractive redheads are likely to have had a little more genetic mixing in their past than others.
Gingerism
All of these discussions of hair color, genetics, and attractiveness really don't address the bigger issue of prejudice, however. No matter how many good, sound theories there may be pertaining to the biology of attraction, and how or why it may be biased against people with red hair, it does not change the fact that biology cannot explain the insults, the taunts, and the hate crimes that gingers have to put up with their entire lives.
It also doesn't explain that gigantic influence that culture has, both positively and negatively, in the perception of redheads. Anti-redhead bias is dramatically more prominent in the United Kingdom, for example, than in the United States — with no really solid explanation apart from ingrained cultural prejudice.
Moreover, it is fairly trendy for actresses — usually those who are already considered popular and beautiful — to take on a redheaded look in order to be daring, edgy and fashionable. Julia Roberts, Rose McGowan, Cynthia Nixon, and Debra Messing are some memorable examples of celebrities that made red hair look exceptionally good.
So the scientific answer to the question "is there a basis for the stereotype that redheads are unattractive" is what someone might expect, if he is familiar with science. That answer is: Eh, kind of, but not really.
Studies show that on average, people may be less likely to make a move on a redheaded girl or accept the advances of a redheaded guy. On the other hand, as long as you don't have prominent freckles, many gingers can pass as blondes or brunettes, showing that the difference is purely superficial.
Moreover, if you are already hot, you can get away with dying your hair red and it's seen as "trendy" rather than unattractive.
And while there may be a plausible evolutionary explanation for a minor anti-ginger bias, especially in southern latitudes, true "ginger haters" will have to look somewhere else for an excuse for their bad attitudes.

Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.

The HUG - What does it Reveal?




Blake Shelton, 37, gave Miranda Lambert, 30, a bear hug backstage at the MusiCares Person of the Year event in LA on Jan. 24.  Patti observes that they show such a beautiful merging in the above photo.  They look like one person!  Patti noted that she does not think it would be possible for them to hug each other any tighter.  Miranda's smile is so content and sincere, and Blake's smile shows such security according to Patti.  Patti gives this couple a 5 on the Life & Style True Love Rating scale.


Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.