How well does your doctor dress?

How well does your doctor dress? That was the question a team of researchers asked 275 patients in an effort to discover if clothing has anything to do with our trust of the medical profession.

What they found was that doctors who dress down on the job seem to be inadvertently be sending the wrong message to their patients.

The scruffy, surgical-scrub wearing doctors portrayed on TV shows like "ER" and "Chicago Hope" don't seem to cut it.

It seems that most patients prefer the buttoned up look of TV doctors from an earlier era, opting for a "Marcus Welby, MD"-type physician.
"A carefully dressed (healthcare) provider might convey the image that he or she is meticulous and careful. Alternatively, an unkempt appearance might convey impressions of uncaring or disorganized behaviour," write Drs. Matthew H. Kanzler and David C. Gorsulowsky of Stanford University in California.

In the study, 275 patients between the ages of 24 and 60 who visited 2 different dermatology clinics in California completed a survey about the physical characteristics of medical care providers.

Most patients "had no preference with regard to the sex, age or race of their medical care provider," according to the report in the journal Archives of Dermatology.

However, more than one third of the group thought that male health care providers should avoid cologne, open shirts, long hair or ponytails and earrings. At least one in four patients preferred traditional hairstyles for their doctor, regardless of gender, and would rather see their female physician wearing a skirt, dress or dress pants.

One in four of those surveyed thought that wearing tennis shoes or surgical scrubs was undesirable for both male and female physicians.

"Based on the results of this study, to best serve their patients, medical care providers...should wear a name badge, white coat, and dress shoes and should avoid wearing blue jeans, clogs and sandals while on duty," Kanzler and Gorsulowsky conclude.