I’ve always been interested in first impressions. I was taught (and saw in real life) that people make judgements on the silliest things like skin colour, accent, looks and even clothing.

How does this relate to physicians who are stereotypically smart, intelligent and very capable professionals? Well, studies have shown that people do judge competency of doctors by their attire and prefer their doctors to wear white coats and name tags.

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Interestingly enough, physician attire, while being stressed as important even from Hippocrates’ time never had a static description to it. At times, attires were totally unique and at other time based on the current fashion.

Now this made me think. Isn’t body piercing a current fashion (or at least close to it).  A survey by Mayers et al. (2002) mentioned that as many as 51% of students at an undergraduate campus had body piercing. Body piercing seems to have gone from taboo to acceptable.

So the million dollar question is whether or not patients care about their doctor’s body piercing? It turns out they do, and so do fellow physician colleagues according to a study by Newman et al (2005).

The results of the study claimed that 24% of patients felt nose piercing to be appropriate for a physician, while 22% felt lip piercing were acceptable. Earring appropriateness was dependant on the sex. There was no negativity to females, but only 35% of patients found it to be appropriate for males. Interestingly enough competency or trustworthiness was not at risk for male physicians wearing earring(s), unlike that of nose and lip piercing.

The study also covered faculty physicians where nose, eyebrow and ear piercing was met with 7%, 5%, 20% acceptance respectively.

So physicians does this really make a difference for you? I mean if you’re an emergency room doctor, most of your patients will be glad to see you from all the waiting and some of your patients won’t get the opportunity until after you save them. Most doctors have enough patients as it is (or at least that’s the case where I live) and it won’t matter if one or two will protest and leave. However, it might influence the way your colleagues think of you but it seems that sooner or later they’ll find out the real you.

Perhaps this article is more relevant to the patients. All doctors have to pass the same exam and have to know the same stuff for their specialty. Not trusting a doctor because they have body piercing could take away a good opportunity to be treated by a very competent doctor. This will hurt you not them.

So the moral of this story being don’t judge a physician by their body piercing.

PS: I don’t have body piercing I just found this topic to be interesting.

Reference:

Mayers LB, Judelson DA, Moriarty BW, Rundell KW. Prevalence of body art (body piercing and tattooing) in university undergraduates and incidence of medical complications. Mayo Clinic Proceedings. 2002;77:29–34.

Newman AW, Wright SW, Wrenn KD, Bernard A. Should Physicians Have Facial Piercings? Journal of General Internal Medicine 2005 Mar;20(3):213-218.