Seductive Patients

The rules of sound medical practice have a carefully built-in safeguard for the woman patient being examined or treated by a male doctor: another woman, usually a nurse, must be present. There is no corresponding protection for the physician who is the object of seductive advances during interviews with his female patients. Psychiatrist Herbert Vandervoort of the University of California at San Francisco believes that such advances are made often enough to justify having inexperienced young doctors forewarned and provided with a check list of the various seductive types whom they will have to recognize and fend off.

In a report to the American Medical Association, Vandervoort suggested that women who behave seductively in the doctor's office fall into five classes: HABITUAL FLIRT. One who has learned early to handle her anxiety in regard to men by flirting with them. The doctor is in no great danger because habitual flirts rarely go beyond the stages of teasing, promising and innuendo. DOCTOR KILLER. A "downright dangerous" patient, actually a man-hater who must dominate her physician to meet her own psychological needs. If she succeeds in seducing him, she will spread word of her triumph to destroy him socially and professionally. BABY DOLL. The wide-eyed, superficially compliant "young thing" (but of any age), who tries to make the doctor feel "You are such a great big strong man and I'm such a tiny, itty-bitty little girl." Her pliability is balanced by a hostility toward men that will eventually cut the physician down to size. FUN PATIENT. The "goodtime girl" who tries always to please the doctor and never to make demands upon him. Her seductiveness is aimed toward "friendly" intimacy that may prove more emotionally significant and complicated than the doctor expected.

LOLITA. The girl in middle or late adolescence who dresses and acts provocatively. In many cases she is not purposely seductive and is perhaps hardly aware of her impact on older men in whom she rekindles potentially hazardous fantasies of youth or lost opportunities.

Loyal to his professional colleagues, Vandervoort believes that most doctors are likely to be baffled when women patients set their sights on them as men rather than as physicians. But his judgment of those who succumb to blandishments is harsh. He assigns them to a medical subspecies of H.L. Mencken's Boobus americanus. To the degree that a doctor surrenders to the fantasy of being irresistible, he becomes ineffective as a physician.

Since the release of Vandervoort's report, many women have written to him insisting that he has it the wrong way round -- that it is the doctors who are trying to seduce the patients. "One woman," he says, "wrote saying she'd been seduced by five different doctors. She carefully included her name, address and phone number, so that I could be No. 6 if I wanted."

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