Never Be Afraid to Do What’s Right
“OUR LIVES BEGIN TO END THE DAY WE BECOME SILENT ABOUT THINGS THAT MATTER.” -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I wasn’t originally planning on writing this article, but when I was reflecting on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’ s life, I couldn’t help but feel an intense sense of relevance to the quote above. Back when I was an employed Physical Therapist, there were decisions that we had made as a team that a part of me felt was wrong, but a part of me also felt justified in doing because no one had spoken up about it; it felt normal. Keeping patients on our schedules, though they were ready to be let go, for the sake of “injury prevention.” Which I later learned was a way of making sure the revenue kept coming in. People regularly being confused about their bills and their medical conditions, because we who work in healthcare live under this umbrella of secrecy, where we justify these occurrences by telling ourselves, “oh it’s too complicated, the average person wouldn’t be able to understand this anyways.” Eventually this started eating at me, as I had now realized that just because it’s normal, it doesn’t mean it’s right or justified. And the more it happened, the more it would affect me. I got to a low point, where I dreaded the idea of going to work every morning with this self-disgust in the back of my mind. The only thing that kept me going was the love I had for my patients, and the comfort I had in knowing that I was taking care of them in some degree. But it wasn’t enough. Eventually I started speaking up and taking a stand. I started letting patients go before management wanted them to go. I started taking more time to explain the complexities of billing practices and medical conditions to patients, even though at times this meant the clinic would lose money from a loss of billable productivity. And for doing this, I would regularly be disciplined for negatively impacting revenue. I was disciplined for doing the right thing…
That’s when I finally came to realize that the only real solution was for me to get out that system, and for me to create my own system where honesty, transparency, and patient empowerment are considered a major priority, instead of a major inconvenience. It initially scared the crap out of me to take this leap of faith into the unknown, but like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says,
“NEVER, NEVER BE AFRAID TO DO WHAT’S RIGHT, ESPECIALLY IF THE WELL-BEING OF A PERSON… IS AT STAKE. SOCIETY’S PUNISHMENTS ARE SMALL COMPARED TO THE WOUNDS WE INFLICT ON OUR SOUL WHEN WE LOOK THE OTHER WAY.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
