ALTHOUGH casual dress has become the fashion rule in many workplaces, we prefer our doctors to be dressed neatly and formally in the old-fashioned white lab coat. So says Dr Lawrence J. Brandt, a medical-school lecturer who has become a 21st-century one-man band for the return of dress codes.
He’s just written a heavily researched commentary in a major medical journal to make his case. A few years ago, the chief of gastroenterology at Montefiore Medical Centre in the Bronx, New York, began noticing that many of the medical students attending his lectures were slouched and unkempt, wearing scruffy jeans and sneakers, toting filthy, beat-up backpacks. There was barely a pressed shirt or a tie to be seen. What a contrast to his medical school days in the late 1960s, when everyone was expected to be neat, well-groomed and professionally dressed.
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