White coats should not be worn by physicians any longer, and should only be worn by people who don't need to physically touch patients as part of their daily work in the hospital!
Now, I don't want to offend anyone with this post (it's already too late), but it seems these days that the only qualification that one needs to don a long white coat is to work in some patient care area of a hospital. The long white coat used to be the way patients, families, and other hospital medical staff could instantly tell who was a full-fledged attending physician. In fact, the emphasis on the white coat starts on the first day of medical school with something aptly called a "white coat ceremony."