The Dark Triad of Personality and Medicine

I'm too Geczy for my shirt

The recent conviction of Quentin Geczy, a medical student at the University of Sydney who tricked at least three women into believing he was a surgeon and even offered one of them a script for opioids, should surely cause an identity crisis for the medical profession as a whole.

If you haven’t caught up with Geczy’s exploits already, he romanced several women using his status as a (fake) surgeon to woo them, and even proudly displayed a Yale University testamur for an Arts degree that had been altered to look like a Doctorate of Medicine. According to the Daily Mail, he would text these women x-rays as proof of his prowess in the operating theatre, and even altered his hospital ID badge to say ‘Doctor/Ortho RMO’. Of course he did. He even has a website with a ludicrously large close up of his face and credentials including his ‘work in various labs including Organic Chemistry, Neurobiology and Anatomy’. Okay mate, we all did Year 10.

www.quentingeczy.com

Bigger than the question of individual culpability is: if one of these guys very nearly slipped into our ranks, what does that say about us as a profession? How sane are we really? The medical profession has long held itself in high regard, with a self-determined reputation for level-headedness and sound mind. The interview process for gaining entry to many Australian medical schools, more than just another arbitrary way of trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, was supposed to be instrumental in determining the ‘right’ kind of egg deserving of the career. But are we deceiving ourselves? Are we, dare I say… just like everybody else?