Everyone likes to think their relationship with their doctor is special and specific if for no other reason than that when you don't feel good, you want to relate to someone who is spending all their time making you feel better.

And that makes me wonder how it is to be a doctor. Doctors have many patients, most of them different from one another, but the doctor has to make each patient believe that the doctor's whole attention is devoted to that particular patient and his or her particular problem.

That can't be easy because in general people tend to have a common set of problems. Most patients don't get exotic or odd or even unusual ailments - they are pretty similar and ordinary. Yet the doctor has to appear to the patient to find his or her symptoms individual and, everyone would hope, specific to treatment.

In my own case my doctor is a woman - a young woman at that. When I was younger this would have been very unusual. Most doctors were men, even the obstetricians, who deliver babies.

I know of one obstetrician, male, who delivered literally thousands of babies in his lifetime, but who had no use for female doctors, whether they were obstetricians or internists, and who wanted no part of midwives, simply because they were women.

"Women don't know anything about delivering babies," he used to say, in defiance of the obvious fact that only women have babies.

Nowadays that's all changed. Soon about half of all medical school students will be women, and they will go into practice as everything from obstetricians to cardiac surgeons.

I don't have any problem with my doctor being a woman. She's a good doctor and she takes good care of me.

Indeed, I think more about a couple of other things than I do about her gender. First, she's a lot younger than I am - almost fifty years younger, I'd guess. While I don't think that age confers wisdom, it does seem reasonable for me to believe that I've acquired a lot more experience than she has.

But that experience hasn't been in medicine. Rather, it has been in fields she doesn't need to deal with. What I am seeking from her when I pay her a visit is the benefit of an intense set of years she spent in medical school and her internship and residency.

I also want from her her undivided attention when I tell her my complaint or complaints. All patients have complaints - otherwise they wouldn't be seeing a doctor. In my case the complaints are few. I'm seeing the doctor because of chronic high blood pressure, something that afflicts well over half of all older people.

Like a lot of things in life, some visits are more successful than others. Blood pressure differs from day to day and hour to hour, and it rises and falls depending on what's going on.

My doctor chides me about what's called "the white coat syndrome." That means my blood pressure tends to go up when I see her and down when I'm at home. But then my blood pressure has always been variable.

She checks my medication, looks for other signs and symptoms - like fluid in the lungs, a sign of congestive heart failure, for instance - and sends me on my way with a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

Somehow this last is as important as listening to my heart and checking my lungs. It's a sign that she knows I am an individual, that for about a half-hour she has given me her undivided attention and that she is doing all she can to keep me healthy.

And that's what a doctor has to do most of the time.

That some doctors don't is, of course, unfortunate. That most manage to do so most of the time is the core of the patient-doctor relationship, an odd but necessary part of human life that we've sustained for centuries.

Let's hope it continues, despite all the strains and tugs to which medical care is being subjected these days.