There's another side to this fear. As a medical student, I was taking care of this 19-year-old who was biking back to his dorm when he got struck and hit, run over by an SUV. He had seven broken ribs, shattered hip bones, and he was bleeding inside his belly and inside his brain. Now, imagine being his parents who flew in from Seattle, 2,000 miles away, to find their son in a coma. I mean, you'd want to find out what's going on with him, right? They asked to attend our bedside rounds where we discussed his condition and his plan, which I thought was a reasonable request, and also would give us a chance to show them how much we were trying and how much we cared. The head doctor, though, said no. He gave all kinds of reasons. Maybe they'll get in the nurse's way. Maybe they'll stop students from asking questions. He even said, "What if they see mistakes and sue us?" What I saw behind every excuse was deep fear, and what I learned was that to become a doctor, we have to put on our white coats, put up a wall, and hide behind it. There's a hidden epidemic in medicine. Of course, patients are scared when they come to the doctor. Imagine you wake up with this terrible bellyache, you go to the hospital, you're lying in this strange place, you're on this hospital gurney, you're wearing this flimsy gown, strangers are coming to poke and prod at you. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't even know if you're going to get the blanket you asked for 30 minutes ago. But it's not just patients who are scared; doctors are scared too. We're scared of patients finding out who we are and what medicine is all about. And so what do we do? We put on our white coats and we hide behind them. Of course, the more we hide, the more people want to know what it is that we're hiding. The more fear then spirals into mistrust and poor medical care. We don't just have a fear of sickness, we have a sickness of fear.