God I relate to this so hard. So many doctors just dismissing the constant pain I go through, so many times I seriously just sit and think “What if it’s something stupid that nobody is thinking of.”
I hate the state of medical service in the United States. Most expensive medical care in the world, but if you’re poor, you’re wasting the doc’s time.
It really makes me wish I could turn back the clock. When I was a kid, my pediatric GI was very aggressive with my treatment - each appointment that I had she would ask how I’m feeling and if the answer was anything less than “I feel fantastic!” then she would start to come up with a way to pivot my treatment along with finding more tests (where applicable) to continue trying to tackle the issues. All other answers meant there was still work to be done.
As a kid it wasn’t something that I understood and could appreciate, from my limited perspective it just looked like she kept wanting to put me on new things that had the potential to make me feel even more sick (I vividly remember having to take a course of antibiotics at one point that made me sick for weeks), or to be put through more machines, have more of my blood taken, etc. I’d do anything to get that back though, as you mentioned, doctors are incredibly dismissive.
I don’t even know when doctors (at least here in the US) started to turn sour. Even as a kid, before I got referred to GI my PCP was incredibly dismissive of my concerns and that of my parents - their “best” theory for why I was practically just skin and bones came down to “He probably has an eating disorder that you’re not aware of”. The other thing I liked about my pediatric GI was that she spoke to me, not “about” me to my parents. Even though my parents obviously don’t go to my doctors appointments now, in a way it still feels like I’m being “spoken about” rather than spoken to with most of the doctors I see.
In comparison, almost all other people that I’ve interacted with in the medical world are fantastic - lab techs, nurses, nurse practitioners, phlebotomists, etc. Its just the doctors that are terrible.
I constantly hear about how medical science is so advanced, but with the way doctors generally act… well, “could’ve fooled me” is usually my words on that.
God I relate to this so hard. So many doctors just dismissing the constant pain I go through, so many times I seriously just sit and think “What if it’s something stupid that nobody is thinking of.”
I hate the state of medical service in the United States. Most expensive medical care in the world, but if you’re poor, you’re wasting the doc’s time.
It really makes me wish I could turn back the clock. When I was a kid, my pediatric GI was very aggressive with my treatment - each appointment that I had she would ask how I’m feeling and if the answer was anything less than “I feel fantastic!” then she would start to come up with a way to pivot my treatment along with finding more tests (where applicable) to continue trying to tackle the issues. All other answers meant there was still work to be done.
As a kid it wasn’t something that I understood and could appreciate, from my limited perspective it just looked like she kept wanting to put me on new things that had the potential to make me feel even more sick (I vividly remember having to take a course of antibiotics at one point that made me sick for weeks), or to be put through more machines, have more of my blood taken, etc. I’d do anything to get that back though, as you mentioned, doctors are incredibly dismissive.
I don’t even know when doctors (at least here in the US) started to turn sour. Even as a kid, before I got referred to GI my PCP was incredibly dismissive of my concerns and that of my parents - their “best” theory for why I was practically just skin and bones came down to “He probably has an eating disorder that you’re not aware of”. The other thing I liked about my pediatric GI was that she spoke to me, not “about” me to my parents. Even though my parents obviously don’t go to my doctors appointments now, in a way it still feels like I’m being “spoken about” rather than spoken to with most of the doctors I see.
In comparison, almost all other people that I’ve interacted with in the medical world are fantastic - lab techs, nurses, nurse practitioners, phlebotomists, etc. Its just the doctors that are terrible.
I constantly hear about how medical science is so advanced, but with the way doctors generally act… well, “could’ve fooled me” is usually my words on that.