Photograph by Katherine Bish
Ken Konchel is an actor who performs for a very select audience. As a pretend-patient in both the Washington University School of Medicine Standardized Patient program and the Saint Louis University Clinical Skills program, he’s been playing a sick man for young doctors-in-training for some 15 years.
What sort of symptoms have you had to simulate? So many. Right now for Wash. U., I’m doing shortness of breath. I’ve done depression. I’ve done back problems. Gastric ulcers. Lower GI things. There are some of us doing three or four different characters in two weeks’ time and keeping track of all our allergies and our conditions and where it hurts and our backgrounds and our family medical histories—it’s a lot more involved than people realize.
Has anything bizarre ever happened during a session? One time a student was so nervous that—you know the thing that they use to look in your ear and they put a plastic, pointy cone on the end of the instrument? Well, she used that on my eye, and she poked my eye pretty good. No lawsuit, though! [Laughs]
How much does it pay? It ranges from $15 to $30 an hour. The genital-rectal exam is the most invasive, and quite frankly, the least popular. You get paid the most for that. I started with it, but I kind of burned out after about eight years. So I “retired” from that, and now I just do the [medical] histories and the physical exams.
You got tired of being poked and prodded? I couldn’t have said it any better.
Have you ever been instructed to act like a jerk? Yeah. I heard stories recently about a situation where the patient was supposed to be extra-agitated, and some of the teaching associates took it to this level of performance that was Oscar-worthy, from what I heard. My best friend made this great suggestion that we should have some kind of Oscar ceremony at the end of the semester.
What advice would you give to people pretending to be sick when they call in to their bosses to play hooky from work this spring? You probably want to offer some kind of condition that your boss wouldn’t want to know the gory details about—something really gross, like a lower GI problem.
