Does anyone know of a list being maintained somewhere on the Internet where you can contribute your complaints and irritations advice to medical specialists on how they can improve their bedside manner? In the absence of finding one, I’m starting mine here. I’m feeling inspired by visits to several specialists over the last few years, ranging from obstetricians to paediatricians to neurologists, and I’m informed by a friend recovering from breast cancer that her oncologists were equally as bad.
- Cut out the silly baby talk – don’t refer to any part of my body as “the plumbing” or “the water works”. If you’re uncomfortable with anatomy then you’re in the wrong occupation. You would actually be empowering women and girls to use the correct terms for their anatomy.
- Be very gentle with all your internal examinations. After years of medical training and practice you shouldn’t still be continually hurting your patient’s cervix during a medical exam.
- Never refer to me as a girl, as in “Good girl”. I’m 35 years old.
- Don’t crack jokes incessantly (to relax us both?) about me, my consultation, sex, or womens’ bodies. One of us has to be naked and one of us doesn’t, try to keep this in mind with your sense of humour (which is lame). I know you have some communication difficulties, interpersonal skills are not your strong point and normally I’d help you out with that by doing most of that interpersonal work for you and smoothing things over between us. But today I have to be naked in front of you and I don’t feel up to doing all your communication work for you as well.
- Also, if you’re a habitual joke-cracker, don’t be so defensive when I crack a joke right back at you. It is my way of trying to make your jokes more appropriate to the setting.
- Never refer to my questions as “simplistic”, especially when you then find yourself unable to answer them.
- Become informed enough to separate your personal views from your medical knowledge. I come for medical advice not your conservative personal opinions.
- I don’t mind if you call me by my first name, I quite like it, but in that case I am also going to call you by your first name too. Don’t flinch. We are equals.
- Don’t treat any of my questions as ‘hysterical worries’. I paid a lot of money to see you and the waiting list was terrible, I didn’t take these concerns lightly to be here.
- Yours, dear reader?
Don’t whisk me in and out of the appointment so quickly that I don’t have time to remember to ask whether those drugs are ok for breastfeeding. I’m paying you $55 because you’re too up yourself to bulk bill. The least you can do is give me more than 2 mins. After all, it takes me more than three hours to earn what I’m paying you.
When you’re whipping out a woman’s reproductive system, don’t tell her it’s a simple procedure. My mother’s surgeon did, and it isn’t for the patient.
* Try not to look annoyed and bored when I ask a question.
* When you realise I’m a Dr., don’t reply with ‘Ahh, but not a real one’. PhD’s were around when you and your forebears were relying on leaches and scoffing at hand washing, and guess what? There’s a good chance I’ve studied longer than you and know more about my field.
* Don’t order tests without my knowledge, without explaing to a nurse why they are necessary and what they have/not found, and then piss off to another job, leaving a registrar to fumble through reading numbers he doesn’t understand, and leaving me with the news that there may or may not be something wrong with my liver, I may or may not have an unidentified virus and it ‘probably won’t’ affect my unborn child.
* Don’t, really, really don’t, respond to my request at the beginning on an induction for a small dose of syntocin, with: “I like to go in hard and fast. We want the baby out by sundown because it’s good Friday and if something goes wrong it costs more to get a pediatrician in on public holidays”. At that point in proceedings, faced as I was with the knowledge my baby had been in distress and my bp was apparently dangerously high, I didn’t want to know about the staffing issues you face – difficult though they no doubt were.
Gah! Feels good to get it off my chest …
{banging head against wall}
I try, really I do, to help my colleagues…I try…
I recognise these, and would like to add that I have never had any of these experiences with my female gynaecologist. Does that say something?
I would like to had that I HAVE had some of these exeperiences with a female OBGYN – who I noticed also treated ‘her’ nurses and midwives as theough they were somethign she scraped off her shoe. Roughest most horrible internal even seen/felt was a female Dr.
On another note I did a whole lot of health research recently and apparently when surveyed only 30% of people actually felt they understood the information given to them in a specialist visit (of any type)
I believe you have hit the sore spot with that. Doctors do NOT think of themselves as “equals” to the rest of us mortals.
I love all your responses.
Pauline, I was just about to say that my recent experiences with specialists have re-confirmed for me why I normally insist upon a female doctor. But you’ve pointed out that arrogance comes with either gender. I still think the odds are better when you get a female doctor.
A couple of really good friends are doctors, so I don’t hate you people or anything. And Jay, your approach as a doctor, as depicted on your blog, regularly has me wishing I’d stumbled upon you in the surgery at my appointment. You give doctors a very good name.
Oh, and I forgot the other one: when I’m working as your receptionist and treating me like crap, it doesn’t reflect well on you that your treatment of me changes when you find out what I do at uni the other three days a week.
Don’t spend 25 minutes tutting my answers to your questions about my child, telling me not to assume I am right about any of it, write copious notes, go out and take a couple of phone calls and then come back and tell me I was completely correct and write the prescriptions I started out asking for. Oh yeah, and order a couple of invasive and utterly pointless tests, just in case it looks like I was right about something. We didn’t do the tests.
My obstetrician is wonderful. She was nothing like this and I was mightily impressed at her efforts to mask her personal opinion about the (initial, and ultimately false) genetic test results we got. The person who did the tests though? Lovely woman, but gives me another point:
Don’t call me with test results that could tell me my unborn child has Downs Syndrome and then say “Oh, you’re out, maybe we should discuss this later.” Really, no, I shouldn’t have to beg to get the results.
When I bring child number 3 to see you with a middle ear infection, and you’ve been our family doctor since before child number one was born. Do not repeat to me for the umpteenth time your mini anatomy lesson on the structure of the middle ear and why little kids get ear infections – I remember!!! Also, when my blood test results show I’m anemic please don’t start talking to me about my inherited risk of bowel cancer because, you know what, I don’t share any genetic heritage with my father-in-law. This man was my share care GP for all three pregnancies and did a great job, he was fantastic with the kids when they were babies but as time went on something changed and now it seems that he’s just kind of going through the motions, there’s no animation there, I wonder sometimes if he’s a bit depressed or something.
I switched to seeing another doctor in the same practice eventually, a lovely man who always asks after other family members when I go to see him and remembers what we talked about last time. We’re on a first name basis (as I was with the previous bloke) and I never feel like he’s talking down to me, in fact he often gives the impression that he assumes I already know what he’s about to tell me and he’s just reminding me or clarifying details. Plus he’s obsessed with VW cars and has toy cars for the kids to play with on his desk 🙂
One of my old housemates went to the doctor concerned that she hadn’t had a period for a while. The doctor got her to do a pregnancy test. Standard procedure? Well yes. But not if the patient has only slept with one bloke, once, more than ten years previously. Immaculate conception is pretty rare, what were you expecting?
Don’t whisk me in and out of the appointment so quickly that I don’t have time to remember to ask whether those drugs are ok for breastfeeding. I’m paying you $55 because you’re too up yourself to bulk bill. The least you can do is give me more than 2 mins. After all, it takes me more than three hours to earn what I’m paying you.
I second this – I only just met my obgyn at my 12-week check-up, and I only saw her for the length of time it took her to come in, check the baby’s heartbeat, double-check my birthdate and vitals, ask if I had any questions, and pop back out. I was so startled by the quickness of it all (I had been expecting a full pelvic exam) that I stammered “No” before I remembered that I had, in fact, had a question, but by then she’d already scooted out. She was nice enough but just – it’d be nice to be given the time of day, you know?
And I’d add to #1 – don’t ridicule patients when they use the proper terminology, especially when those patients are well-educated.
I haven’t had the ‘you’re not a real doctor’ response to my PhD, most doctors usually show interest in my research background.
A bit late in the piece, but: when you are a doctor at a university health centre, please stop assuming that every female patient you see, no matter her symptoms or complaint, requires an STD or pregnancy test, every time. When my friend is pretty and blonde and peppy and COMPLAINING OF AN EAR INFECTION, please only draw your conclusion from ONE of those things.
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