There are bad doctors. Doctors are human and they are fallible. Stop telling people otherwise, especially chronically ill kids. They need to know that sometimes the doctor will screw up and that they will likely be the only one to pay the price for it. Doctors can be prejudiced, doctors can be wrong. They are giving their “medical opinion,” which is fine, just don’t try to treat it like law when four other doctors would give you four different answers.
Seriously. Fat people, POC, mentally ill people, disabled people… we aren’t lying when we say doctors fuck up sometimes. We aren’t lying when we say we don’t always feel comfortable or safe in a doctor’s office or that we don’t always get adequate treatment.
Took me over 2 years to convince my doctor I was suffering returning pain. Which he refused to take serious with his hot takes of “Your blood samples are good”, “I don’t think it’s so bad,” and “We’ll see.”
Really feeding into my fear that I was just a hypochondriac, not even my issues with dizziness and panic attacks taken serious, and I was not good at confronting him on it. Because I trusted the doctor’s authority.
Took me being sent to the wrong clinic twice so THEY had to send him a note to tell him where to send me to, because THEN he trusted I was actually dealing with something. Everyone else took it serious when I described what I was going through, except him. And he waved it off. Heck, when I told him it was multiple symptoms that might be connected, he shrugged it off wanting to only focus on ONE thing at a time, instead of looking at the possible connection.
FINALLY I get approval to be sent to a specialist who IMMEDIATELY could tell me what was wrong, so I could start on looking for treatments. After over 2 years, where it has reached levels of chronic pain, constant fatigue and growing numbers of sick days. Causing anxiety and depressive episodes.
Worse is, I know he’s competent. When I finally went to him with my migraine issue as no painkillers work on me, he listened. He asked questions. He considered my case, taking it serious. Got me the meds I needed. But only because migraine was so much easier for him to take serious, than an invisible chronic illness he couldn’t be bothered to care about despite my growing pain.
Doctors are here to help us. They work so very hard to get where they are. But they also do fck up, and you need to question their authority. Even when I knew he was fcking around at the cost of my health, I didn’t had the guts to confront him and demand to be taken serious.
Get second opinions. Demand tests. Demand they note down the case you brought up in your file, and to add in the note if they refused to take the tests you need to confirm or deny what’s going on.
In the end it’s YOUR health, a far too great a cost with rarely anything hitting back to incompetent medical staff unless they REALLY actively screw up.