Cheering for the doctor behind the blacklist?

Doctors must come down from their high horses and act in respect to public interest and sentiment.

Some doctors have gone on a fund-raising campaign to back a trainee doctor arrested for creating and circulating a so-called blacklist of trainees noncompliant to the mass walkout in protest to the government’s plan of enlarging the medical school enrollment quota. Some happily donated by exalting someone who had pestered peer doctors. The thought of a fund to ostracize members of one’s own community is obnoxious.

The junior doctor conjured up a list of names and other private information on trainee doctors still keeping to their duties at hospitals and medical students who have returned to classrooms despite the collective boycott order. The doctor shared it on an online community under the mocking title “Honorable Doctors.” The exposed doctors must endure scorn from their peers and are bombarded with menacing texts.

From the start, junior doctors claimed that their walkout came from individual choice. If so, those who chose to stay behind should be respected. Denying them can only be suspected of the selfish motive of defending protesting junior doctors’ collective action or fretting disadvantages because of them.

Police filed for an arrest warrant on the junior doctor for violating the Act on Punishment of Stalking Crimes, and the court issued a warrant citing concerns about an escape or destruction of evidence. Continually uploading private information online constitutes a crime, yet some doctors are rooting for the perpetrator. Lim Hyun-taek, head of the Korean Medical Association, called the junior doctor a “victim of government persecution,” and the Gyeonggi Medical Association argued that the creator’s act was backed by the constitutional right of the freedom of speech, condemning law enforcement for “violating human rights” by arresting him.

Lives are being jeopardized because ERs are rejecting patients due to a critical shortage of doctors. General hospitals are being painstakingly sustained, thanks to the around-the-clock devotion of doctors who stayed behind. We are appalled by the selfishness of the doctors who merely care for their own interests. We can only suspect their elitism and egocentrism.

The government’s plan to increase next year’s medical school admissions quota by 2,000 has received skepticism over the last seven months since the walkout by trainee doctors. The near 90-percent approval of the increase has been nearly halved. Yet the selfish and fiery behaviors from some doctors interrupt the sympathetic mood. A medical reform deciding on the future supply of doctors relies on the consensus of the public, not the doctors. Doctors must persuade ordinary citizens if they really want to win the fight against the government plan. They must come down from their high horses and act in respect to public interest and sentiment.