I recently overheard a doctor( or nurse?) complain/worry about a patient( high-strung, rigid, & social anxiety, from the sound of it) who was refusing to reschedule a surgery after the surgeon had to cancel the initial date 36 hours prior: “I'm at my wits' end with this patient: she'll die if nothing is done, and he's the only surgeon within a thousand miles who can perform the operation.” The person the doctor was talking to first asked whether [name] “had to cancel because of his mother's funeral?”, and, after confirmation thereof, “Did anyone tell her[ the patient, I presume] that?”, to which the doctor's response, so immediate it sounded as though he was conditioned, was “He doesn't owe her an explanation. He's the expert.” as if that should have been obvious. The other person chose not to press that point, and pivoted to discussing other options; thereafter it was mostly the doctor wondering if he should order a mandatory psychiatric evaluation to force the patient into the hospital, and trying to justify it while the other recommended against it with increasing distress.

I wanted to say something, but I didn't know what yet and they got off the train before I could spin that thought out into something comprehensible. But I did eventually, and since I wrote it out in a Reddit comment tonight, here it is:

I get where the idea came from: it's a little bit of worrying about liability, combined with a massively maladroit attempt to address the troubling trend that recent generations have been less willing to trust experts, both in medical practice and in other science-based professions( and lately, even in history). The notion of countering it that way seems to have originally come from out-of-touch former researchers and practitioners who became lecturers and hospital administrators, mostly Boomers who were disgruntled about what they saw as disrespect from Generation X and Millennials, compared to the awe they felt of their own lionized forerunners that were seen as pioneers of human understanding, uniformly celebrated by the media in their day. They conflated the 'problem' of unquestioning belief fading away with the genuine issue regarding the modern lack of confidence in expertise, and something figured the solution was a return to seeing scientists as larger-than-life figures.

But the truth is that those things were never really linked; instead, shocking revelations about environmental and ethical disasters shook the foundationsm of expert ‘giant-hood’ in the 1970s, with the subsequent end of the Cold War propaganda about how ‘our scientists are the best', every generation after X has been raised to be cautious and open-minded, which has unfortunately become ‘doubtful of whether any academic question is ever really settled'; and a college or even post-graduate education just isn't as rare these days, especially when you compare educational content from the past and present—frankly, I learned science concepts in 1990s elementary school that my parents, born in the 1940s, had never even heard of until college, if at all. By middle school, ALL of my social studies and science homework was, without exaggeration, completely beyond the scope of their entire education—except for anatomy, that my mother knew as an R.N.( and frankly she learned a lot about revisions in medical understanding that had come to pass after she transitioned to a clinical nurse specialty in psychotherapy).

So what I'm saying is, I'm aware that the modern standard in many fields is that you should never say anything about your personal life to patients(/clients/investors) because “anything that humanizes you in their eyes undermines your credibility”; ignoring the hard reality that most people in the Western world younger than 35–40 never saw scientists, doctors, or other experts as superhuman in the first place. I also know that lots of highly-educated people get told in college nowadays that “Professionals shouldn't make excuses.”, but you know what?

The latter is NOT supposed to mean you don't say anything when you let someone down, it's supposed to mean you tell the truth and help other people set more realistic expectations of you; and
the former is just total bull crap, at least for healthcare workers: if you have a death in the family or your kid breaks a limb at school, you should say so, otherwise people are naturally going to feel disrespected. Why? Because when you don't say anything, it seems like whatever you were prioritizing that caused you to cancel or be late( at their expense) isn't even important enough to mention, or they're not important enough to mention it to—either notion belittles the patient, thus doing far more damage than you're preventing. So
thinking that, taken together, those ‘standards’ mean that offering no explanation for failure is better than admitting it's your fault( or even just acknowledging that you're equally susceptible to the whims of fate) is just absolute, gross, nasty, bull DIARRHEA, especially for those working in healthcare.

So no matter what your professor or grad school advisor said about so-called "oversharing", a 'clinical'/'professional' distance is NOT a workable solution to the ‘expert credibility crisis’—especially not for doctors, nor any scientific consultant interacting one-on-one with a layperson. Because society is different now, and people are more educated overall, in the present day what you leave unsaid & unknown doesn't create nor maintain any kind of awe-inspiring mystique about you—it just makes you look unreliable for no clear reason at best, and inflames a generalized suspicion( in the vein of "What is it [you]'re not saying and why are [you] hiding it?") of experts at worst.