Doctor D has been remiss in his blogging duties.
AskAnMD is going into hibernation.
Welcome to Dr. D's CLINIC OF DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONAL AWESOMENESS!
Doctor D has been remiss in his blogging duties.
AskAnMD is going into hibernation.
A reader asked her specialist a question that befuddled him, so she wrote Doctor D this question:
How is a doctor allowed to mess around with body parts he doesn't understand?
Doctor D always loves to read your thoughts in the comments.
Do you think that Dr. D is over-stating the uncertainty of medical science?
Patients and Heathcare People: How has this Myth affected you?
Doctor D gets lots of emails from students considering medical school.
Hey, if the practice of medicine is your dream then you should go for it, but be forewarned it isn't sexy or glamorous like on Grey's Anatomy. It is years of drudgery in which helping patients and feeling awesome about yourself will be the exception rather than the rule.
But I pray to God you never go totally off your rocker and spend your precious days off making videos like these:
Doctor D has more relevant material than silly parodies of parodies of parodies, but unfortunately not the time to post it right now.
He's also about 2 months behind on answering AskAnMD emails. Feel free to chastise him the comments!
Find another doctor. If one doctor-patient relationship didn't work there are lots of other fish in the sea. Move on!
Bad Patient Syndrome is a prejudice, and like most delusions prejudice is most dangerous when you try and expose it. Prejudice is subconscious. Docs don't recognize we think this way. Your confrontation or insisting on your innocence only confirms our suspicions that you must be a manipulative asshole.If you directly attack a delusion it will only entrench itself. You have to work on it subtly until it is the prejudiced person who realizes they were wrong. Your doctor must think they discovered you aren't a bad patient on their own, without any confrontation from you at all.
The best way to approach this is to imagine yourself in the doctor's shoes. Ask yourself, "If I suspected someone was manipulative, dishonest, or crazy would this behavior seem to confirm my suspicion?" If the answer is YES or even MAYBE then don't do it!When a patient suspect they're being unjustly labeled as being a bad patient the instinct is to resist. Patient's get angry or argumentative. They beg and plead. They lose control of their mouths and emotions. They accuse their doctors of incompetence or malpractice. They behave erratically and refuse to work with their doctors. These desperate attempts to resist only confirm the doctors' prejudice toward them.
If your doc seems frustrated with you say in the most genuine way you can, "I know I'm a difficult case, and I realize I'm in the wrong on this. (Take the blame even if you weren't wrong) I'm still new to needing medical help. How can I do this in a way that help you, doc?"I realize this feels like giving in to an asshole bully who has mistreated you—and in some ways it is—but if you have an illness that needs medical help and the entire medical system is against you then you might have to play along with our delusion for a while. Sorry!
Chances are if you are getting repeatedly labeled a Bad Patient there is something about your style of interaction that sets off alarms in the medical psyche. Work patiently with one doctor to cure your "Bad Patient Syndrome" and you'll likely find the doctor-handling skills you learned will work with every other MD you encounter.
What really shocked her, though, was the distinct feeling of hostility she felt from her doctors.
In desperation, she wrote Dr. D to ask, "WTF just happened?"I wish I could say that situations like this are rare, but they aren't. I've written before about Nice Patient Syndrome. Unfortunately there is also Bad Patient Syndrome, and it claims a lot more victims than the former.
"But why would doctors who chose this profession because they want to help people be suspicious?"Doctors have control over work excuses, narcotic pain medicines, and the exams that determine disability. This makes us popular targets of sleazy folks who want to get things they shouldn't. Docs get told more lies middle school teachers and probation officers. After getting burned a few times we learn to be suspicious. We even find ourselves being suspicious of patients who have nothing to gain from fooling us.
What we should do is admit that we aren't superheroes after all and confess that your situation has confounded our ability to help. From personal experience I can tell you this is really hard to do.Feeling powerless is a huge narcissistic injury to our superhero ego. It is a lot easier to accuse you of being a villainous bad patient who is unworthy of our heroics, that admit that we aren't as super as we would like to be.
What do you think?
Have you ever been the "bad patient" or been the heathcare provider who misjudged a patient?
Doctor D always loves to hear your stories and opinions in comments.
Is Healthcare A Right?
News Flash to Republicans: Socialist Medicine has been here for decades! Doesn’t it just make you feel dirty?
We're already providing free care—we’re just doing a piss-poor job of it:
Bad enough that Republicans are right to complain that our kids already owe China trillions of dollars we’ve wasted on healthcare.
Also bad enough that Democrats are right to point out that millions of uninsured are sick and dying without the care they need.
Humans are naturally self-serving and take the path of least resistance.
Most people will treat anything that’s free like it’s worthless and waste it without even thinking. Just look what we did with this planet God freely gave us!
We have the right to be free but we also have the police to arrest those who use their freedom wrongly.But nobody wants a police state and nobody wants a free medical system that is constantly saying NO.
Everyone has different values and motivations, but we all accept that money has some value. If we want universal access to medical care then it has to cost money.It doesn’t have to cost much money. In fact healthcare is best if kept inexpensive. The “free market" cost of healthcare is a huge barrier to most people’s access. But there has to be some barrier. Drop the cost to $0 and you get a tidal wave of people wasting very costly care.
Okay, Dr. D has managed to piss off both the Left and the Right!
The floor is now open to your comments. Just try and be civil with each other.
Next post Dr. D will studiously avoid politics and return to the regularly-scheduled programing on Doctor-Patient Relationships.