Unsatisfying doctor visits

 One of the problems with doctor visits today—as I’m sure you’ve experienced—is that, because of the insurance reimbursement requirements and/or strictures imposed by their medical institutions--doctors are limited to fifteen-minutes per patient and sometimes less. I try to be sympathetic with their plight. Still, it makes me mad. In their rush to move on to the next patients, doctors often fail to listen to and consider everything a patient has to say.

A 1999 study of 29 family physician practices found that doctors let patients speak for only 23 seconds before redirecting them. In the study, only one in four patients got to finish his or her statement. Here’s an example reported on the PBS News Hour: a woman with an acute sinus infection went to see an ear-nose-and throat specialist who, she said, “…looked up my nose, said it was inflamed, told me to see the nurse for a prescription and was gone.” When she started protesting the doctor’s choice of medication, “He just cut me off totally,” she said. “I’ve never been in and out from a visit faster.”

Even if a doctor listens to what you have to say, they often ignore your words, mostly, I suppose, because they are the experts and you are not. Ignoring a patient can lead to misdiagnosis. In her memoir, Smile, Sarah Ruhl tells of developing a terrible itch all over her body after she became pregnant. When she called her doctor about it, she writes, “…he told me that sometimes pregnant women get itchy. It’s normal he said.” She did an Internet search, found a condition (cholestasis of the liver) that matched her symptoms. It turned out she had the disease--one that can kill unborn babies.

Dr. Jerome Groopman tries to help doctors become aware of their thought processes when diagnosing a disease. Among other research findings, Groopman notes that “…research shows most physicians already have in mind two or three diagnoses within minutes of meeting a patient, and that they tend to develop their hunches from very incomplete information.” In other words, they jump to conclusions.

Sometimes you're just on your own--with help from the Internet.

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