4 ms·

Doctors act like authorities and get upset with patients when they disagree with treatment.

• aggieben 11y ago
  I don't keep asking for advice from those kinds of doctors.
• mindcrime 11y ago
  Some doctors do that. Certainly not all do. Example: I went to see my GP recently, and as part of the conversation I brought up a drug he had me taking. I said I'd read up on it and noticed that it's considered highly addictive and not a very pleasant drug, and asked if there was any other option. He proceeded to rattle off a list of options and the implications of each, and said "what do you want to do?" I said "let's try X for a few months and see how that works." He agreed that was a fine course of action. Similar story: at a recent checkup, my cholesterol numbers had mysteriously shot up by a huge margin. He called and said I should double my dose of the statin blocker I'm on. Well, I don't even want to be ON a statin blocker, and I was doubtful about my cholesterol taking that big a jump for no reason. So I suggested it might be a bad test, or some kind of weird outlier, and suggested we wait a month and test it again. We did and my cholesterol was back to perfect. So no change in the statin dosage. I can also ask him to order specific tests for things I'm interested in (c-reactive protein for example, or the NMR LipoScience lipid test) and he's fine with doing that. Now maybe my doctor is really weird in this regard, but he really treats me as pretty much a peer when it comes to decisions concerning my health. Not "peer" in the sense that obviously I'm not a doctor, but as in it's my health, and he acknowledges that it's my health and my decisions, which I can make with his consultation.