What to Do When You Hate Your Doctors
Finding a medical professional you can trust. Let alone like can be very difficult but it is essential to your health. Especially when your choices are limited. Perhaps due to the size of your town or an inability to travel, you may get stuck with a doctor you simply cannot stand. Here’s what you can do about it.
Understand Your Feelings
When you first begin having negative feelings toward your doctor, you should deeply consider what is causing your reaction. If you can confidently identify which elements of your experience have prompted your emotions, you will be better equipped to avoid the same situation in the future. There are types of behaviour from patients that doctors simply cannot stan. Which means your hatred may be inspired by your own actions in your doctor’s office. For example, you may experience negative feelings from your doctor if you:
- Invite along family members who interfere with doctor’s advice
- Do not accurately reveal your past medical history and current medications
- Refuse to follow medical advice despite chronic illness
- Ask for medication when simpler lifestyle changes will solve the problem
- Demand unrelated prescriptions and tests
If you alter your behaviour, you may find that your doctor immediately becomes more amiable. Of course, it is also possible that your dislike arises from the doctor’s behaviour. Every doctor is different, just like every patient. This means that not every doctor will have the exact demeanour you find reassuring in a medical professional. Your doctor may be too brusque and handle you clumsily. Which is off-putting no matter how accurate his or her diagnoses are. If this is the case, you should discuss with your doctor your qualms and your preferred method of treatment.
The best reason to hate your doctors is a demonstrated lack of ability. If your doctor has been negligent with your health, ignoring obvious symptoms or ineptly treating simple maladies, you have a good reason to leave that practice and find a better medical professional. You may even want to seek legal help if the ramifications of your doctor’s behaviour have been severe and cause you plenty of pain and suffering.
Live With It
Thankfully, most people do not frequently visit the hospital as I have. This means most people do not have the opportunity to develop strong emotions about their doctors in one way or the other. It may very well be that you hate your doctors. However, if you only see him or her once a year, you should be able to stomach the encounter without much trouble. As long as you keep your visits short and to the point, your distaste for your doctor may not impact your life.
Of course, when we are unwell we often have the tendency to take our feelings out on those around us. It could very well be the reason you hate your doctors stems not from her inadequacy or irritating conduct but rather from your pain and discomfort. Before you make any rash decisions regarding your health care, you must evaluate whether your disease or treatment is clouding your judgment. You may simply need to adjust your own attitude before the surgery to endure the visit.
Explore Your Options
If you ultimately decide that it is time to leave your current, doctor in favour of one more suited to your tastes, you should do some research before severing any ties. The goal is to find a doctor you click with. So you can avoid a similar uncomfortable relationship in the future. Jumping immediately to an unknown doctor may create an even worse situation than your current one.
You may be able to get a decent referral from your current doctor. Or you can ask friends with similar health issues where they seek medical treatment. There are even some websites and apps that offer ratings and reviews of different doctors. After you compile a list of possibilities, you can call and ask about qualities and procedures that matter to you; for example, if you dislike prescription pushing, you should find a doctor who focuses on holistic health and natural healing. Eventually, you will find a doctor you love, not one you love to hate.
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In order to defend their self-image and inflated ego, they resort to blaming patients for having anything they can’t diagnose. They _all_ do this, not just a few of them.
And usually they will then just dismiss you and refuse to do anything. At most they will give you patronising lifestyle lectures or refer you to to the equally-useless mental-health professionals (often invoking that astonishingly stupid term “medically unexplained symptoms”, which _they_ seem to interpret as meaning “not real, entirely the patient’s own fault”, when what it actually means is “symptoms we, as a profession, collectively, need to do more work to medically explain”).
Can you imagine how far physics would have gotten as a science if every phenomenon that didn’t fit into the current understanding of the topic were just written off as “physically unexplained phenomena” and ignored?
Seems to me that medicine is not really much of a science, because it has that God-of-the-Gaps means of explaining away anything that doesn’t fit the theory and because practitioners treat that theory as a kind of Holy Scripture, ignoring anything that contradicts it.
My dislike of doctors is learned, from over three decades of bad experiences with them. I really don’t want to hate them – I can see that they help some people and do have _some_ useful knowledge – but they keep giving me new reasons to be angry with them, each time I see another one.
They are consistently rude and bullying because they massively overestimate their own expertise.
If you have something they can’t diagnose they get increasingly angry about it, and invariably will blame you for it,. Because the alternative is for them to face up to the limitations of their own knowledge, which seems to be something they _really_ don’t want to do. I guess because their Number One priority is protecting their own ego. The thought that they aren’t omniscient appears to be unbearable for them.
It’s not just one-or-two bad doctors, though, it’s the entire profession. It’s a collective problem with the entire medical mindset. They have absolutely nil humility.
Let’s face it, just because someone has a medical degree does not mean they are a good person. Many doctors went through school and training simply for the paycheck. I speak as one who has 3 doctors in her family, and a multitude of friends and acquaintances who have at least tried the route.
I’ve had many, many wonderful doctors in the past. To me a good doctor is one who listens to the patient and does not jump to conclusions based upon how much time they’d have to spend with you otherwise, or how much money they can pad their own account with. They listen, take notes, call other doctors if there needs to be some collaboration, and finally make adjustments and recommendations.
Getting a referral from the doctor’s office for another physician can be impossible. Likewise with finding someone willing to refer you to their doctor. Just keep trying until you find one you get along with, and don’t fear the names that sound exotic, sometimes they can be the blessing we’ve been waiting for.
I’ve had a not good doctor in the past but for the last year I have a really good doctor who I trust and can talk to . I have to see her quite a bit but I have a terrible struggle getting past doctors receptionists to get to see her. It’s a nightmare. I recently got fobbed off with 2 quacks! One gave me meds for a chest infection that didn’t work the second declared I had pneumonia and gave me meds that didn’t mix with what I already take I was unbelievably ill and had terrible side effects. I’m much better now but in future I won’t see anyone only my doctor. I saw her for a check up and she wasn’t happy she would have given me something different. So I don’t care much for receptionists and in future I will shout ! Shouldn’t have to but I will.
becoming to s/b coming to
(Can you imagine what people woke up to, a screaming out of control nut job)
My husband’s Ophthalmologist/Surgeon verbally had a meltdown on me in the middle of a day surgery recovery room. The front desk 23 yo receptionist told her what I said about her during a private conversation between my husband and I. She then told my husband what a bad girl I was during his sedation recovery. Let alone she did this while people were becoming to.Talk about a unprofessional immoral Beverly Hills brat.
She then pretends nothing happened during the post-op apt the next day. Needless to say, we don’t talk anymore. I apologized during her meltdown but being that she is an anointed God, has never owned her bad behavior.
The office staff is hostile to me, even people I’ve never met. OK, I get the Safe Zone thing, but I ask ?’s they can’t answer, and they get hostile towards me. It just blows our mind. There is nothing wrong with ‘I don’t know that answer”. This office stinks from the head down. $12 an hr w/ an attitude.
This doctor has swiss cheese in her stories and uses Therapeutic Privilege way too much. I have right not to trust her. Trust is earned, not a gift. Many docs are just not the right fit. It’s your body/body part mechanic. They can be fired.
I fired a knife happy Breast Surgeon who wanted to control mysecond opinion, and went to a more tech oriented provider, and saved the breast. I didn’t have cancer, and the 2nd opinion told me the 1st opinion was absolutely unworthy of my trust.
Great post, you should never be afraid to be open about your thoughts and opinions about your Dr’s surgery.
Had a really bad doctors over year ago and moved towns and now have a brill doctor who listens
Terrible article. You should look at why you feel that way as if it is some problem that the doctor has with you. Some doctors are just not too good and can cause problems for the patient no matter what.