Please stop this: "There are more ___ than Ebola victims in the US"

I get it. Can we please stop comparing the number of Ebola victims in the United States to all sorts of irrelevant things? PS: It's not that funny either.

The following are directly copied from recent tweets. Links have been removed for your protection.

There are more Saudi Princes than Ebola victims

Kim Kardashian has had more husbands than Ebola victims in the US

More Americans have been dumped by Taylor Swift than have died from Ebola

Fun Fact: More #kids die annually due to #faith healing than #Ebola.

FACT: Katie Price has claimed more victims than Ebola.

NYC traffic. another thing that's much more dangerous than #Ebola, courtesy of @bobkolker via @intelligencer

There are more people in this tram than ebola victims in America.

I've lost more followers than US Ebola victims [I didn't tweet this or any of these other tweets.]

@lbftaylor fewer #ebola victims in US than drunk Palins in a #PalinBrawl.

@pbolt @robertjbennett Also, there are more ex-wives of Larry King than there are ebola victims int he US.

Rush Limbaugh has more ex-wives than USA has Ebola victims!

@xeni Menudo has had more members than 3x the number of American Ebola victims...

Put #ebola in the context of vaccination preventable dz: 118,000 children < 5 yrs old die from measles per year

@Tiffuhkneexoxo @LeeTRBL more dc team quarterbacks have played this year than there are US ebola victims

Rest assured, there will always be more American guns in Africa than Ebola victims. Everything is fine. Relax

As #Enterovirus spreads faster x country & kills more than #Ebola, sure victims' parents must b sad congress isn't demanding an ED68 czar.

We are all far more likely 2 be victims of identity theft than #Ebola. Obama has a plan to fix that

Americans spend more money on Halloween costumes for their pets than the UN spends on helping Ebola victims and fighting ISIS combined.

@mikebarnicle 9900 gunshot victims since Newtown, much scarier than Ebola.

So FYI... More people die from the #flu than #ebola .

Fear hospital infections not Ebola. 1 in 25 patients are infected. 75,000 die yearly.

Every day in America around 100 people lose their lives to mostly preventable car crashes. #Ebola

There are more experts on CNN right now talking about Ebola in America than people with ebola in America.

Doctors should be more like…

A while ago, Atul Gawande, the noted surgeon-author, wrote a long piece in the New Yorker on why healthcare should look to a restaurant called the Cheesecake Factory for some guidance on how to standardize things.

This was met with some derision by a number of physicians who pointed out, among other things, that the food at the Cheesecake Factory is not great and is loaded with calories. But I guess it's at least it’s "standardized" mediocre and unhealthy food.

Then a doctor named Peter Ubel wrote in Forbes magazine that doctors should take a cue from Starbucks about how to deal with people. He went so far as to say that baristas have more emotional intelligence than physicians.

He says the Starbucks staff are trained to placate angry customers using the mnemonic “LATTE,” which stands for “Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take action by solving the problem, Thank them, and then Explain why the problem occurred.”

I have never worked at Starbucks, but when I was a surgical chairman, I unknowingly used most of their principles in dealing with patient complaints about my attending and resident staffs. I could add another. I used to ask the dissatisfied patients and families "What can I do to make you happy?"

I was surprised that in many cases, the complainants could not think of a single thing that would make them happy. The question often completely diffused the confrontational nature of the encounter. You might want to try it sometime.

Another way of looking at this issue was suggested by a Twitter colleague, Dr. Edward J. Schloss, who tweeted that we work for the government, and we should be compared to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles or the post office, not Starbucks.

Since doctors are already notorious for making people wait, comparisons to the BMV would seem appropriate. And some docs also take forever to return phone calls, similar to the post office's habit of delaying the mail.

Surely physicians look better when compared to another government agency, the Internal Revenue Service, especially now that the IRS has been accused of selectively harassing certain political groups and spend lavish amounts of money on conferences.

At least no one has suggested comparing us to pilots lately. I have dealt with that analogy decisively in the past here.

Why should practicing medicine be compared to any other occupation?

Doctors are unique. None of us is perfect, but despite the occasional bad apple, most of us are doing the best we can for our patients under difficult circumstances.