With Ben Carson, the Doctor and the Politician Can Vary Sharply
“He says what he thinks,” Dr. Brem said. “He clearly doesn’t get a preapproved consensus.”
“Medically he was that way, too,” Dr. Brem added. “He didn’t worry that other neurosurgeons said, ‘You can’t do this.’ He wasn’t worried that other people weren’t doing it, because he felt the way he sees the world he was generally right and there were good outcomes from it.”
.. Before he became so famous, though, Dr. Carson was occasionally mistaken for an orderly and received chilly receptions from some patients who had not encountered an African-American doctor, he has written.
Carol James, his longtime physician assistant, recalled meeting with parents who used “extremely biased” language in speaking of black people. “I simply stopped and said, ‘Do you understand that Dr. Carson is black?’ ”
They agreed to let him treat their child. “I think they ultimately were very embarrassed,” Ms. James said, “and had gone and spoken with other people who knew who he was.”
.. Dr. Brem said that as a surgeon, Dr. Carson “did have a profound sense of confidence,” operating on some “children who other people felt surgery wasn’t an answer for.”
.. Previous separations taught Dr. Carson that “eventually the surgeons fell apart because of exhaustion,” Dr. Brem said. So one of his rules was that each surgeon rotate out after four hours, although normally, “we never leave an operation in the middle,” Dr. Brem said.
.. She said she later decided it might reflect another quality: “how he is open to compromise.”