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following on from my last post
There's a question I'd like to pose to you all, and that question is this:
What do you want from your doctor?
I know a lot of people who have had bad experiences because they're queer, or overweight, or trans, or have a disability. I know a lot of people who have had bad experiences because they weren't listened to or weren't taken seriously, or because the doctor walked into the consultation with certain assumptions or communicated poorly with them.
I'm not really talking about the healthcare system as a whole, more about doctors as people and the one-on-one relationship they have with patients, both in primary care settings and in hospitals. I don't want to turn into the doctor people blog about because their experience was degrading or insulting or unhelpful or embarrassing. And as the daughter of a surgeon and a GP, someone who's never gone to a doctor herself except for basic things like stress somatisation and vaccinations (and even then, armed with a fairly thorough medical knowledge), and as a healthy white cissexual upper-middle-class person who's still struggling to recognise and own her privilege, I know I haven't had the same experiences that a lot of other people have.
I want to know what to look for when observing others in my profession for the remainder of my degreee. I want to know: what should I become? What shouldn't I become?
(Mental health is definitely included in this; it's a particular area of interest and concern of mine, and I think it's poorly understood and poorly approached by a lot of medical professionals.)
Feel free to link this post, if you like. The more opinions & anecdotes (good or bad) I get, the better.
What do you want from your doctor?
I know a lot of people who have had bad experiences because they're queer, or overweight, or trans, or have a disability. I know a lot of people who have had bad experiences because they weren't listened to or weren't taken seriously, or because the doctor walked into the consultation with certain assumptions or communicated poorly with them.
I'm not really talking about the healthcare system as a whole, more about doctors as people and the one-on-one relationship they have with patients, both in primary care settings and in hospitals. I don't want to turn into the doctor people blog about because their experience was degrading or insulting or unhelpful or embarrassing. And as the daughter of a surgeon and a GP, someone who's never gone to a doctor herself except for basic things like stress somatisation and vaccinations (and even then, armed with a fairly thorough medical knowledge), and as a healthy white cissexual upper-middle-class person who's still struggling to recognise and own her privilege, I know I haven't had the same experiences that a lot of other people have.
I want to know what to look for when observing others in my profession for the remainder of my degreee. I want to know: what should I become? What shouldn't I become?
(Mental health is definitely included in this; it's a particular area of interest and concern of mine, and I think it's poorly understood and poorly approached by a lot of medical professionals.)
Feel free to link this post, if you like. The more opinions & anecdotes (good or bad) I get, the better.
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Also, as someone with anxiety issues, I think it really helped when my doctor took the time to listen to what was going on in my life and causing the anxiety. It's not your job to be a therapist, but I felt like I was being treated as a human being rather than as a medical issue, and I think that it helped my GP figure out a better course of action because she had the full picture.
And I realize that if I go in with strep, I need an antibiotic, but where possible, if there are multiple viable options, I think it really helps to let patients make some choices about their own treatment or some chance for input. Even if it's just like, "Medication X and Y are effectively the same for dealing with allergies, which would you prefer?" it helps give people a little more control over the proceedings, which I value a lot.