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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Doctors really only fire patients for what they believe is a liability to their malpractice insurance. But I could see how questions could be seen as threatening by some doctors. [/quote]

It's broader than that. My husband's gastroenterology practice, for instance, fires patients who have their screening colonoscopies done by another practice. That's one of the most profitable things they do, so they don't want patients that go elsewhere for those.[/quote]

Wow, so much for the doctor patient relationship. I guess he sees them as future billing opportunities. Kind of gross.[/quote]

It’s a business, isn’t it? If the doctor patient relationship was so special and sacred why would you even be going to a different doctor for your colonoscopy? Oh, because it was more convenient or less expensive? But what about the special doctor patient relationship you have with your gastro???[/quote]

DP.

This is the problem. Some people (not all, and not even many, I think) want to insist that the doctor-patient relationship is not one with any special connotation or status. It's just like any other business, right? But then they *also* want it to be a special relationship that comes with extra obligations -- but only on the doctor. The doctor has to do additional work outside office hours for free, spend uncompensated time (not ten minutes, but over an hour) doing special research on topics or perspectives outside the standard scope of care for their practice, not react to being criticized or challenged as not being good at your job to their face, remain calm in the face of emotional, angry, and/or aggressive patients, and put their license at risk to delicately step around special idiosyncratic concerns about vaccines or masks or my child being special or I know my own body which means I also know all of he field of medicine and so on and so on.

You can't hold both perspectives at once. Either it is, or it isn't. When you insist on the one, you reject the other.

As for me and the people I trained with, we took on this job and its training with the expectation that it was not just a business and there *were* special obligations. But if a given person is going to salt the earth insisting it isn't, then, well, it isn't. Not for that person, as it's obviously not the relationship they are willing to engage in. But then there are not special obligations on me, and if I am *also* not helping them, I will gently but firmly disengage and wish them well.

That's not thin skin. It's not unprofessional. It is eminently practical and respectful of the stated wishes of the patient. [/quote]

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