PENSACOLA, FL – Buzz is building in doctors’ lounges and waiting rooms across the nation, in reaction to last week’s release of the Academy Awards (Medical Edition) categories. Of special note, this year will be the first year that doctors will be nominated for acting awards, along with the 5 traditional “Best Performance by a Patient” categories.
In a tradition stretching back to 1979, the American Academy of Medical Acting (AAMA) announces that year’s potential award categories. This is always eagerly anticipated by physicians who then submit HIPAA-compliant nominations of their most histrionic patients in those categories. However, this year’s unexpected addition of 5 “Best Performance by a Doctor” categories will certainly give jaded patients the chance to strike back with their own nominations!
The categories are as follows:
PATIENTS:
– Best ability to display excruciating pain only when a person in a white coat is nearby
– Most protracted history relating multiple now-resolved symptoms in order to get a work excuse note
– Best performance of struggling to remember that pain med that starts with the letter D (ER patients only)
– Most solemn vow to never drink/smoke/inject/abuse something harmful ever again
– Most creative explanation (mimed) by patient with a rectal foreign body
DOCTORS:
– Best performance of not recognizing a patient when encountering in the grocery store
– Longest suppression of urge to scratch while examining a patient with scabies
– Best performance of being awake while actually sleeping (anesthesiologists only)
– Best performance of charting patient’s rambling tangential history in the EMR while actually playing Candy Crush
– Most undefined acronyms used in single sentence while explaining diagnosis to a patient (oncologists only)
The AAMA is accepting nominations for each category through its website. Currently, all US doctors and patients are eligible for nomination – EXCEPT for Mr. Terry Shadduck, who was stripped of his 2013 “Best Performance by a Patient with Pseudoseizures” award after AAMA researchers discovered that he had worked as a standardized OSCE patient for University of Phoenix Online Med School. The AAMA cited regulations preventing nomination of professionally-trained fakers.
The AAMA also clarified that, as in prior years, this year’s awards will physically resemble the slightly-more-famous golden Oscar statuettes. However, to visually differentiate the Doctor’s and Patient’s award categories, Doctor’s statuettes will bear tiny golden stethoscopes, while Patient’s statuettes will have sturdy retrieval strings welded to the base (just in case the patient later slips and falls onto a statuette while naked and carrying a jar of lube).
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