My daughter and I, after forty years of excellent health-provision service by a male doctor, now retired, have both turned to female physicians for our family doctors. After a Pap smear, when it was revealed that there were some abnormalities present, my daughter was referred by her family doctor to The Ottawa Hospital's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Shirley E. Greenberg Women's Health Centre.

My daughter's physician, herself a young woman with young children, cautioned my daughter that the Centre has a reputation for excellent treatment in women's health issues, but that the doctors and surgeons performing there are not known for warm and cuddly consideration for their patients.

They are cold and distant, and thoroughly professional, utterly lacking a bare modicum of bedside manner.

We talked about that, she and I, telling one another that the main issue here is the expert professionalism in applied medical knowledge and technology that was of importance. Far less so the amount of, or in this instance, total lack of emotive compassion for the patient. Better to have a competent surgeon than a warm and friendly incompetent bungler.

It could be left to the nurses, nursing assistants, technologists, orderlies, to exude compassion and care, for they invariably do. As they did on this occasion when she and I entered the hospital for her scheduled surgery. The nurses, nursing assistants, technologists and orderlies were all consummate professionals, but they also were caring human beings.

My daughter's surgeon did not speak with her pre-surgery, nor did she approach to speak with her post-surgery. She saw the surgeon in the operating theatre surrounded by her medical subordinates, coldly efficient, and obviously unwilling to compromise her methodical professionalism by betraying any vestiges of humanity.

We have heard on occasion that it is too difficult for such professionals to become personally involved with their patients. That the most effective approach for them is to simply view the succession of patients they care for as surgical patients, not human beings who are in need of ameliorating surgery to allow them to continue to live healthy lives.

In my own experience, with doctors and surgeons who have so expertly and professionally looked after me, all those medical personnel, both male and female, have treated me with kindness and human compassion. Mine has not been a broad experience for I have been healthy throughout my three-score-years-and-ten-and-then-some.

But I have encountered enough surgeons and appreciated their human concerns for me as a vulnerable human being, from cardiologists to internists, ophthalmologists to anaesthesiologists to know the difference between a decent human being willing to acknowledge their humanity and one whose hubris places them above all that.

It is a shattering experience to face the uncertainty of an invasive medical procedure. There is the knowledge that things can go very wrong. There is the fear of the unknown; how you will yourself come through the surgery, whether the pain will be manageable, if the operation will be a success, and how you will manage recovery to your former state of health.

A brief reassurance by the physician in whose care you are obligated to entrust your medical future would speak volumes in calming many of those fears. Assurances spoken directly from the lips of the attending surgeon who might take a few moments to speak to the patient, before and after surgery can make a monumental difference in the confidence of the patient.

Any doctor who is incapable of recognizing this vital and simple fact may be an excellent surgeon technically, but an abysmal failure as a decent, caring human being.