Reply to How do you know it's time to switch doctors?

Forum Index » Health and Medicine

Reply to "How do you know it's time to switch doctors?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My husband is a doctor and I'm a research scientist. For us it's not about bedside manner or "clicking". It's about making the right medical decisions. I've had very few bad doctors in my life, ones who actively did something wrong, or omitted doing something that should have been obvious.

What's more common are doctors who miss going in the right direction the first time around, because the patient unintentionally leads them astray with their reported set of symptoms, or because they hyperfocus on one cause and forget to do all the right checks for any other. That is very common. Are they bad doctors? Depends how far they go in the wrong direction, I suppose. But they're also human and fallible.

My husband is a very good diagnostician in his specialty but has a poor bedside manner. He wants to find what's wrong and treat it, not hold your hand and give you the tissue box.
[/quote]

Your husband is why so many people get such bad healthcare in this country.

He can be the best diagnostician in the world, but if he can't communicate with patients and elicit useful information, it's his fault. The patient doesn't know what's wrong with them and doesn't know what information to provide and a lot of important information is hard to articulate or embarrassing. Interacting with people is a talent and to a degree a skill, and your husband should get off his high horse and work on improving his relationship with patients.[/quote]

PP you replied to. You seem confused. He explains very well, and has often led seminars on how to let the patient talk, instead of asking leading questions right off the bat. But he only talks science. No small talk. No feelings. He's not warm and fuzzy, but very clinical. He's an infectious disease specialist with an MD and a PhD (and autism tendencies :-) ).

[/quote]

Yeah, sounds like he's the definition of the problem.

Look, this isnt' rocket science—his skills are worthless if he can't get the information necessary to make an accurate diagnosis, and his accurate diagnosis is worth absolutely nothing if he can't communicate back the relevant facts, the risk, and the best way to treat. If he only gets half the story, his diagnoses are worthless, if he figures out what's wrong, but leaves the patient confused, frightened or uncooperative about followup treatment, it was just a big waste of time.

Health problems are terrifying and overwhelming for most people, and some people will respond very well to a no-nonsense approach, and your husband might be a great doctor for those people. But in fairly overwhelming numbers, most Americans feel the healthcare system is cold, impersonal, monolithic, confusing, etc. Some of it is the nature of health problems, some of it is the bureaucratic system, the byzantine financial end, the unfriendly admin side workers, etc... So, for a lot of people, your husband's approach is the worst one. Go talk to anyone who has ever worked in journalism, sales or retail... if you can put a person at ease, it's insane what you can convince them to tell you or do for you.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics