as small as a world and as large as alone, bittersnurr: eponinejosette: ...

3:35am June 15, 2015

eponinejosette:

chronicallyannoyedwithpain:

h413y:

Here’s a shoutout to the people who have gotten more sick or injured because of doctor’s error. Society puts doctors on a huge pedestal because they save lives but they’re human and they make mistakes. It’s okay that’s you don’t trust doctors. It’s okay if you get scared when someone tells you that you need to go. Your feelings are absolutely valid.

Also shout out to all the people who are suffering or have suffered without treatment because doctors didn’t even believe your symptoms are real, let alone that they have a real medical cause. It’s okay to not trust doctors’ opinions and think they’re just gonna gaslight you or right you off as a drug seeker. Your feelings are absolutely valid.

If your doctor won’t listen or you don’t feel comfortable around them, get a new doctor! Doctors are supposed to work FOR you to get you the help and care you need. If they aren’t then you have every right to be upset and find a new one. You always have a right to a second opinion. What you feel is real.

Shoutout to those of us who have been cycled through dozens of doctors because they consistently refuse to treat you.
Shoutout to everyone who has spent months waiting for an appointment with their new specialist only to get to the visit and be told they can’t help you.
Shoutout to everyone who calls a new doctor every month to ask if they will take you on as a patient, only to be told they are full, don’t take your insurance, or don’t treat People Like You and then get told you are not trying by your other doctors or family because you’ve failed to get in anywhere.
Shoutout to the chronically ill who have been abused by their doctors or therapists consistently their whole lives and still have to go and see them because opting out of medical care all together could kill you.
Shoutout to people who have been raped by gynocologists and forced into invasive exams and reliving trauma because if you try to get out of it you can’t get your medication.
Shoutout to everyone who’s only available support systems believe doctors can do no wrong and get yelled at if you try to talk about your trauma, because you are clearly an outlier, and speaking out gets you accused of hurting other patients by discouraging them from seeing anyone.

Shoutout to everyone who has been accused of faking things despite having a longer list of positive medical test results for the conditions they’re supposedly faking, than the people accusing them of doing the faking – and much of this accusation coming from the fact that you don’t automatically trust medical professionals, and say so publicly a lot, which annoys people who have some weird vested interest in making medical professionals seem infallible.

Shoutout to everyone who has been told that you shouldn’t be allowed to take part in self-advocacy/disability rights unless you show everyone proof of your diagnoses – and then if you do, having even that proof used against you somehow.

Shoutout to everyone who has referred to any doctor as less than perfect, who has then been told something like “You only dislike doctors who don’t tell you everything you want to hear” – by complete strangers who know nothing of your actual medical history or history with the doctors in question. (For instance, I referred to a particular doctor as a jerk because he had tried his hardest to convince me that I wasn’t a real adult, and tried to manipulate my parents into controlling my life in a quasi-guardianship type way, until both me and my parents got sick of his BS, at which point he actually threw a massive tantrum on the telephone when my parents wouldn’t automatically do what he told them to do to me. But apparently the only reason I didn’t like him, according to people on the Internet who knew nothing of this history, is because he preferred using -NOS diagnoses to actual diagnoses (because -NOS “avoided labeling people”…how!?!), even when you met the criteria for the actual diagnosis in question. Which is something I disagreed with him on, but is hardly grounds I’d use to call a doctor a jerk. The best psychiatrist I ever saw had similar biases about “labeling”, and was not ever what I’d call a jerk, even when he was wrong about a lot of things.)

Shoutout to anyone who has ever posted something even passingly negative about a doctor, only to have people online respond in any context with the phrase “the good doctor” (like “Given that you’re probably lying about all this, I think we should hear from the good doctor about this matter before dismissing what he has to say”), used unironically, and entirely to piss you off.

(For context, I got that response when I mentioned that a psychiatrist had unilaterally decided what I was thinking and what motivated me and then written it into my record as fact. In particular, he said that the reason I was upset at a certain point in time was because I wanted to be out on romantic adventures like other teenagers instead of stuck at home with my parents. Which was completely false, but made it into my permanent record as true, because he had a habit of declaring what I was thinking, and then painting it as “We figured this out in the course of therapy,” regardless of whether I had agreed with him at any point in the course of said therapy or not. But apparently I’m not even competent to know whether I was upset about being stuck at home with my parents or not. According to bizarre Internet trolls anyway. But using the phrase “the good doctor” in this kind of context is pretty much always manipulative and nasty.)

Shoutout to anyone who’s been considered a bad patient entirely because a sufficient number of doctors have not gotten along with you for reasons that have nothing to do with what kind of a patient you are or aren’t. Even when you followed their directions to the letter and were as submissive as is humanly possible to be, in an attempt not to be labeled a “bad patient” again. Because there exist doctors out there for whom nothing you can do, save for dying and/or moving away and not being under their care anymore, will ever be good enough, but you have to go back to them anyway because you have literally no other choices to get survival-level care. And for every doctor you don’t get along with, you get a reputation for being “difficult”, even if you have done less to be considered difficult than most patients otherwise demographically similar to you.

Shoutout to anyone who’s ever literally been told, by one of their better doctors, that they were a difficult patient because they were delirious when sick and hospitalized. (For anyone who doesn’t know, both illness and hospitalization are risk factors for delirium, as is previous delirium. So like, hospitalizing someone with a long and well-known history of delirium for being sick and then calling them difficult because of delirium-related problems is a very bizarre thing to do.)