“The Cost Of Assuming Your Doctor Knows Best”
“I never met her — pathologists rarely meet their patients — so, I do not know if she was told that her doctors, both the clinician and pathologist, had missed earlier signs of her cancer. We, the doctors, did not talk to each other about the missed diagnosis.
Doctors wear an impenetrable mask of supreme confidence and of always being right. Admitting a mistake is an admission of failure. Discussing one is worse still. Everyone would know that I had made a mistake. I might get sued, causing me both potential financial and professional harm. And so, I kept quiet. In so doing, I may have even caused more harm.”
This is very real to me because I experienced this problem repeatedly for several years. I had some ambiguous symptoms that were slowly getting worse, to the point where they were interfering in my everyday life and then becoming a problem in my career, and I would see doctors who told me that they couldn’t find anything wrong. I was finally, finally, diagnosed with a rare bacterial infection after I used my Harvard email address to worm my way into an appointment with a specialist.
I don’t blame my doctors for not being able to diagnose me — it’s a weird thing that had only one documented human case the year I first noticed symptoms — but I am frustrated by the fact that none of them said “I don’t know. The tools that I have are not enough to tell you what is going on. It would be a reasonable choice for you to go and ask someone else.” Instead, they implied that they did not believe my symptoms.
I spent years, years, thinking I was a hopeless hypochondriac and ignoring my symptoms. I leaned more and more on self-hatred to motivate me through my life plans: everyone is tired all the time, everyone gets back and joint pain, everyone gets headaches — you’re just being weird about it. Until it got really bad, I didn’t bother telling friends and family; I was ashamed. And when I finally committed to believing myself and finding a solution, I found that I didn’t know how to describe my symptoms or identify how long I’d had them because I never talked about them.
It takes a lot to decide that you know better than your doctor, and it’s really scary on the other side. If doctors had the capacity to say “I don’t know, but I’ll help you find someone who does”, I would be much healthier — physically and mentally.
Related: Lessons from a Delayed Diagnosis; “Medicine’s Women Problem”; “Is Medicine’s Gender Bias Killing Young Women?”; “Can healthcare be cured of racial bias?”
