What doctors can learn from hairstylists.
A little context here:
I’m a former breast cancer patient. My sister died from cancer. Two years before her diagnosis, she was about 32 weeks pregnant and hit by a car, putting her in a coma, with a severe TBI (traumatic brain injury) and a two year journey of rehabilitation. That got me up close and personal with a few of her ER/ICU/neuropsych doctors. Then, my father had a metastatic tumor the size of a golf ball in his head removed, and although he’s ‘cleared of cancer’ now, he lives with the potential of that shoe dropping again every 90 days when he does his scans.
This all means, I have some familiarity with how oncologists, surgeons and a few other medical specialists, engage with those of us who are normies. This has also served me with a Mt. Everest-size passion for making the patient-provider communications and “engagement” experience a significantly better one. I’ve seen the familial, lifestyle, psychological and health outcomes when it goes very badly. I’m guessing a few people reading this probably have, as well.
A bit more context: (stick with me) As a biologist by training, and product manager by operation, I ask “why” a lot, everywhere, about most things; processes, products, behaviors, designs, blah blah, etc, etc.
So as I ponder this problem of the doctor-patient relationship, and the poor health, well-being, life outcomes that result for the patient when that connection (or relationship, or engagement) is sh*t, I have been thinking about another relationship that some may be familiar with: The hairstylist and their client.
There is a significant {positive or negative} affect on the mental well-being of a customer who ever built a ‘relationship’ with a hair stylist. Even if you’ve only seen a stylist once, and it was not a great result, you likely have some not-so-great memory of your emotional state the moment you walked out of the salon and the following eight to ten weeks of your life.
There is also interesting data that shows when things may go awry (hair color that doesn’t look remotely like Brad Pitt’s golden locks, a new ‘do that takes 2.5 hours and 3 hair tools to look like Angela Bassett), some customers still return to their hairstylist — even having reasons for why they return to the same stylist. This is curious because bad results seem forgivable. Even if the stylist may be responsible for the anguish a person has to live through for the next 10–12 weeks, including the extra costs of fixing or hiding the disaster that may even effect their ability to get, or do, a job
Physical appearance and social acceptance are intimately linked. (Another topic not going to be discussed here, but also relevant in my investigation of this phenomenon in both kinds of relationships; doctor-patient or stylist-customer.) The best hairstylists seems to understand this implicitly. The best hairstylists understand that cascade of issues that begin when someone gets up the next morning and they can’t make it look just right for that big meeting. The best hairstylists understand the influence a style, a color, a cut will have on a person’s feelings (and resulting decisions and behaviors on) about their self worth, their lifestyle, their job, their significant other, their sex life (or ability to have one).
The best hairstylists don’t leave any stone unturned to discover these situational contexts, or what I like to call ‘under the ice berg’ reasons, motivating a customer to ask for a style like they saw on Beyonce at her last concert.
Quick intermission: A look at the mind-body connection.
Our mental and psychological health, stress and/or resiliency doesn’t just affect our ability to bounce back after a bad hair cut, or a tough job lay-off …. it also effects our immune system, our gut’s biome, our nervous system— all the way down to the itty bitty little caps on the ends of our chromosomes (telomeres, for those who care) that help keep our cells from pre-mature aging and, a whole not-so-great cascade of other effects on our overall health and longevity.
So, let’s bring back the hair stylists, and introduce the doctors.
The best stylists do more than cut hair. (Leaving all therapist/hair stylist jokes aside.) If you read the Instagram post above, you’ll see this celebrity stylist reference making it “easier” if you’re out there “hustling in your careers”. The best stylists invest in and create future-selves: better salespeople, happier patients, higher performing athletes, etc — they are longer-term strategists, who happen to cut hair. What they really care about is value, and how each customer defines that value. It isn’t the fee-for-service they care about. They care about how their customer feels on the job during that meeting with the Board in three weeks. Or how their customer will find the time to manage their hair during the hot and humid conditions they’ll be in after that 14 hour flight and two hour bus ride to their best friend’s second wedding. Or, what energy, ability or desire their customer will have to put on that specialty wig once the cumulative effects of chemotherapy take over.
Let me illustrate.
Before my father’s open craniotomy, the doctor came into my father’s hospital room. He sat on the edge of my dad’s bed and looked straight at my father. As he spoke, with softness and quiet confidence, he looked straight into my father’s eyes with calm attention. He explained that his job was to offer an opinion around the options, answering questions where he could, and then listen to what mattered to my father, and my mother. That his job, then, was to learn what they valued, needed and support them around what mattered to them — that day and in the future.
When I broke out my journal to start and run through my questions, he physically turned his body on the bed, reached over to my mom, on the other side of me, and asked her for the tissue box. He handed it to me, then looked straight at me. When he was done, he returned his body to face my father, still sitting on the bed, and remained with us for one hour.
When we were done, he asked us how he did.
He wanted feedback. He said in the hundreds of talks like this he had done, he still felt like he needed to get better. And that he learned from each patient, each family, how he could be better.
We sat in stunned silence.
That behavior, that line of questioning, that deep search for understanding, was repeated no matter where or with whom in our family this doctor was speaking. And that situational awareness and central focus on real need — below the obvious need of medical care — showed up in every person we encountered at this hospital, no matter the role. (The gentleman who wheeled my father from his room to surgery had to have been a standup comedian on the side. Who laughs on the way to getting their skull cut open? We all were, including my father.)
Final cut.
So, how can doctors be more like hairstylists?
If we take a cue from my father’s neurosurgeon, and the “best hairstylist” scenarios above, a couple important things bubble to the surface.
- Getting a paycheck for a procedure isn’t how the best define value. Each professional has found a means by which they can make value happen, in the way their customer defines it, and acknowledges the costs to doing so are not “sunk”.
- Despite well intentioned, skilled professionals at the helm, bad things happen. Dying being the worse case scenario. Even in those situations, the best doctors are engaging with their patients, and the patients’ families and other doctors, to address things that help patients feel cared for and understood (and reduce likelihood of blame, or worse, litigation) in a way that doesn’t disenfranchise them with language, tone, patience, or a variety of other means.
- The things patients and their families care about aren’t just cures, shrinking tumors or medication dosages. It’s clarity of language, tone of voice, empathetic honesty, and understanding (or seeking to understand) the myriad “under the iceberg” topics that drive our decisions and behaviors on a daily basis.
Closing thoughts.
I’m well aware of the healthcare ecosystem in which the doctors work, and the influence of it on their profession, their choices (and lack of choice), and their behaviors with patients. This post is not meant to pull out an active agent in that ecosystem and say “just act better and patients’ outcomes will be better and if they aren’t, you won’t get sued”. I know better than that (my former coworkers in population ecology would disown me.)
It’s merely a stream of consciousness on my observations and study of another relationship between a customer and professional that have some interesting parallels to the dyad of patient-provider, for which I have come intimately familiar.
Yes, I know, the two professions don’t have the same parameters guiding their decisions (life or death in some cases).
Still, I am engrossed in research right now, and observing and understanding the effects and practices of this particular dyad (best stylists-customer) may help me uncover some ways of application in another area for which I care deeply.
Do you have any thoughts or comments to share? Please do! Or, share this post, tweet it, or whatever you wish so others might chime in and give me some feedback. :-)
