Handling Nurse Wannabes
This situation can be potentially more harmful than patients who consider the aide to be their nurse. The fact is that anyone working in the proximity of a medical environment is going to pick up on the lingo. Their curiosity is going to be piqued and they are going to absorb a lot of medical knowledge. However, if they have not had the training of a nurse or physician, they often don't understand the bulk of what they have learned. More importantly, they may not understand the potential for harm. That can be the most deadly issue of all.
Nurses don't diagnose, but “want-to-be nurses” sometimes do. Patients may not understand that their best friend, who works in a doctor's office down the street, may not be their best source of medical care or advice.
There is far more to medical education than understanding anatomy and physiology. Just because the doctor's receptionist can tell where your bladder is and even how the E. coli may have been transferred from your rectum to your urethra on the toilet tissue, doesn't mean she knows how to treat the urinary tract infection (UTI). Nor does she understand why you shouldn't take a particular medication because you have a history of allergy or maybe even poor renal or liver function.
This scenario could also be the result of a patient calling the M.D.'s office. The high costs of health care have driven many physicians to dispense with nursing staff in their offices. Instead they may have lay personnel only, or they may have trained medical assistants as any combination of their receptionist/front office/back office help. The trained medical help will have been instructed not to exceed the scope of their practice, but the culture of the environment may not support this.
Other situations exist where the lay personnel may indeed work in an office with nurses as well as doctors. They see certain situations over and over again. The above example might be of a receptionist in a urologist's office. A UTI is a commonly treated disease and she has learned a great deal about how certain infections can be introduced into the body and how they are commonly treated. But this doesn't make her a doctor or a nurse.
This well-intentioned employee should remind the person asking her advice that she is not a trained medical person. She could explain to the person that this is what she has learned in her experience as a matter of conversation. However, her only advice should be for the person to consult her own physician as soon as possible.
Her advice to her friend about proper hygiene measures to avoid future contamination would be well intentioned. But given the context of where she works, she shouldn't be giving advice that could be considered practicing medical care without a license.
All too often these days, doctors are overbooked and not readily available for questions. The Internet is a vast pool of easily accessible information. The media is full of advertising for medications to treat this complaint or that. The climate is ripe for self-diagnosing and self-medicating. As nurses, the challenge is to educate the public to take responsibility for their health, but also to seek qualified medical care as needed.
