Original photo by Steve Cukrov/ Shutterstock
Uniforms convey a sense of competency across professions ranging from delivery person and airline staff to chef and firefighter. The psychological implications may be even stronger when it comes to matters of health: According to one study published in the medical journal BMJ Open, doctors who don the traditional white coat are perceived as more trustworthy, knowledgeable, and approachable than those who administer to patients in scrubs or casual business wear.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factThe Mayo Clinic's founders felt that the white coat would create an unnecessary separation between doctor and patient, and thus established a tradition in which physicians wear business attire to demonstrate respect for the people they serve.
The 2015-16 study drew from a questionnaire presented to more than 4,000 patients across 10 U.S. academic medical centers. Asked to rate their impressions of doctors pictured in various modes of dress, participants delivered answers that varied depending on their age and the context of proposed medical care. For example, patients preferred their doctors to wear a white coat atop formal attire in a physician's office, but favored scrubs in an emergency or surgical setting. Additionally, younger respondents were generally more accepting of scrubs in a hospital environment. Regardless, the presence of the white coat rated highly across the board — seemingly a clear signal to medical professionals on how to inspire maximum comfort and confidence from their patients.
Yet the issue of appropriate dress for doctors isn't as cut and dry as it seems, as decades of research have shown that those empowering white coats are more likely to harbor microbes that could be problematic in a health care setting. In part that’s because the garments are long-sleeved, which offers more surface area for microbes to gather — a problem that’s compounded because the coats are generally washed less often than other types of clothing. Although no definitive link between the long-sleeved coats and actual higher rates of pathogen transmission has been established, some programs, including the VCU School of Medicine in Virginia, have embraced a bare-below-the-elbows (BBE) dress code to minimize such problems. Clothes may make the man (or woman), but when it comes to patient safety, the general public may want to reassess their idea of how our health care saviors should appear.
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The term for anxiety-induced high blood-pressure readings in a doctor's office is “______.”
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The term for anxiety-induced high blood-pressure readings in a doctor's office is “white coat syndrome.”
Western doctors dressed in black until the late 1800s.
If the idea of a physician or surgeon wearing black seems a little morbid, well, that may have been part of the point in the 19th century. After all, the medical field had more than its share of undertrained practitioners who relied on sketchy procedures such as bloodletting, and even the work of a competent doctor could lead to lethal complications. However, Joseph Lister’s introduction of antisepsis in the 1860s dramatically cut the mortality rate for surgical patients, and with it, the perception of the possibilities of medicine underwent a major shift. While black had once been worn to denote seriousness, doctors began wearing white lab coats like scientists to demonstrate their devotion to science-based methodology, a sartorial presentation that also reflected an association with cleanliness and purity. By the turn of the century, the image of the black-clad physician was largely consigned to the remnants of an unenlightened age.
Tim Ott has written for sites including Biography.com, History.com, and MLB.com, and is known to delude himself into thinking he can craft a marketable screenplay.
