Sorry you have had this experience. I really don't know how a doctor manages to be arrogant. I've been doing medicine for 18 years, and I am surprised and humbl

Sorry you have had this experience. I really don't know how a doctor manages to be arrogant. I've been doing medicine for 18 years, and I am surprised and humbled intellectually every day. This is of course what makes the job so interesting and rewarding. But it has certainly never inspired the sense that I know anywhere near 'everything', or that my accumulated knowledge and experience were somehow more important than the individual experience of the patient. Doctors are not assholes. To some, this will be a controversial statement. But they do fail, and they do make mistakes. The biggest mistake a doctor can make is not taking responsibility for the patient. This is fundamentally what doctors do. They might convince themselves that they actually do something else, but I am absolutely certain that taking responsibility for a patient is the core and inescapable act of medicine. And almost always, this is what a patient wants, more than anything else (this is way an algorithm will never replace doctors, but that is a another discussion). All my errors and failures stem from ignoring or passing up this responsibility. Of course there are reasons why this occurred - I was too busy, too tired, didn't think I could make any difference, it was someone else's job etc. There are a litany of rationalisations. But at the end of the day, taking responsibility creates the clarity, freedom and trust that is necessary to have a useful therapeutic relationship. The point is that even if you can't do anything to help the patient, even if their condition is totally untreatable and their suffering immense (as is all too often the case), you will always still help them in some way if you take responsibility. I don't know all the details of what happened to you obviously, but in the framework above, the problem you have is finding a doctor who will take responsibility for your condition. Too often, the doctor is 'set up to fail' in this regard, because they have appointments every 10 minutes, have seen 20 people already today, are tired, hungry, dehydrated, pissed off, burnt out, depressed, sleep deprived etc etc. How can they take responsibility for anything in these impoverished conditions? But this is their fault - as a professional, they must find a way to do the needful, however difficult. I am tapping all this out because I think that doctors and patients don't understand this basic idea about taking responsibility. Some doctors seem to think it is their job to do 15 colonoscopies a day, or to seem clever, or to impress the secretarial staff, or to look eminent in a white coat on the ward round, or any number of peripheral and totally irrelevant things. Actually, for serious conditions, I think a patient should ask their doctor to take responsibility explicitly. "I have this problem, and I am looking for someone to take responsibility for treating it." If a doctor says "yes" in response to this question, even if they seem a bit unsure, you have probably found someone that can help you. If they look baffled, it's time to move on, don't waste your time. You will only end up frustrated and angry.