It seems like as a culture we have a lot of weird baggage around dealing with doctors. It makes me wonder if it has something to do with our fear of our own mortality and unwillingness to talk about death or something.
I remember my classmates who went on to med school and became doctors. They were bright, but I don't remember their being extraordinarily so. Their classwork mostly seemed to involve a lot of memorization of facts, following rules and procedures, not so much thinking creatively or solving problems.
But now that they have MD after their names, we expect them to be familiar with a thousand different kinds of possible nuance? While operating in a system that only gives them 15 minutes per patient to hear what's going on and come up with a plan?
It almost seems unreasonable and unfair of us, but they expect that of us too. If we dare to question their assessment (again, after 15 minutes with the patient), we're "questioning their authority," even if we're advanced degree holders ourselves, and a stay-at-home parent who has spent nearly every waking moment with the patient or reading about research relevant to the patient's symptoms.
I know for every one medical research journalist like the author of the article, there are 10,000 exhausted working single parents armed with Doctor Google and a story about Kim from Accounting's niece's best friend's little brother who had a similar symptom one time, but it really seems like there should be a way to communicate when there really is something unusual going on.
Maybe it needs to be like customer support, where there isn't just one tier of doctor. Maybe there should be a system to filter actual complex cases up layers of specialty. But the customer support experience normally sucks, so maybe the model just doesn't work. I don't know.
There just has to be something that could make it better than this.
I remember my classmates who went on to med school and became doctors. They were bright, but I don't remember their being extraordinarily so. Their classwork mostly seemed to involve a lot of memorization of facts, following rules and procedures, not so much thinking creatively or solving problems.
But now that they have MD after their names, we expect them to be familiar with a thousand different kinds of possible nuance? While operating in a system that only gives them 15 minutes per patient to hear what's going on and come up with a plan?
It almost seems unreasonable and unfair of us, but they expect that of us too. If we dare to question their assessment (again, after 15 minutes with the patient), we're "questioning their authority," even if we're advanced degree holders ourselves, and a stay-at-home parent who has spent nearly every waking moment with the patient or reading about research relevant to the patient's symptoms.
I know for every one medical research journalist like the author of the article, there are 10,000 exhausted working single parents armed with Doctor Google and a story about Kim from Accounting's niece's best friend's little brother who had a similar symptom one time, but it really seems like there should be a way to communicate when there really is something unusual going on.
Maybe it needs to be like customer support, where there isn't just one tier of doctor. Maybe there should be a system to filter actual complex cases up layers of specialty. But the customer support experience normally sucks, so maybe the model just doesn't work. I don't know.
There just has to be something that could make it better than this.