autisticwolfesbrainisautistic:

autmystic:

melredcap:

deadcatwithaflamethrower:

thebibliosphere:

vaspider:

spooniestrong:

blue-author:

Okay, I’ve thought about this question for most of a day, because the obvious answer is “….why would I?”, but it’s clearly not obvious to you.

Now, I know exactly what you’re thinking. They’re a doctor. They’re a professional you’ve gone to for help. And pain and fatigue are, like, medical things, right? Going to a doctor about medical stuff and then saying “LOL NOPE” to what the doctor says is like hiring a plumber and then arguing about how to fix your sink, right? If you’re so smart, why’d you call the plumber over?

Okay.

But now imagine your basement is flooding and you call the plumber. While on the phone, the plumber asks you what the problem is and you say that there’s a pipe in your basement that’s burst and it’s now flooded.

And the plumber—still on the phone—says “LOL NOPE.”

And you say, “Excuse me?”

The plumber says, “Look, a flooded basement is a really severe problem, okay? Usually, these calls, they’re a clogged toilet or a leaky u-bend under the sink. Trust me, this is better. Those are a lot cheaper to fix.”

And you say, “I’m sure they are, but I’m telling you, my basement is flooded. I’m looking down the stairs and I can see the water.”

“I’m just saying, there are other things it could be. It won’t hurt anything to eliminate them first,” the plumber says.

And you say, “But I need my basement fixed! Look, I can’t go down in my basement and do laundry right now, and I have important keepsakes down there in boxes… some of them are already ruined, but maybe I can salvage some if we can just fix the problem.”

“Well, then it will be in your interest for me to check your toilets and your u-bends,” the plumber says.

“The problem is not in my toilets or my sinks,” you say. “I am looking at the problem. I called you because my basement is flooded, and I need you to help me fix that.”

And then… now, I’m not assuming you’re female, but I just want to emphasize that this is a starkly though not exclusively gendered phenomenon, so if you’re not female then imagine you are.

“MA’AM,” the plumber says, in a way you recognize. It’s the voice of putting you in your place, the voice of unearned authority, and with this voice, this word, ma’am, is not a title of respect, it’s a reminder and a command. “MA’AM, if you’ll just calm down. I’m sure what you’re experiencing seems terrible to you, but the truth is, it’s probably not as bad as it looks from where you’re standing. And that’s a good thing! Trust me, have been a plumber for 27 years. Now, when can I come over to check your u-bends?”

“It’s not my u-bends!” you say.

“Ma’am, if you don’t want to be helped, I’ll start to think you’re calling for attention.”

You see?

(Now for bonus points, imagine the plumber refuses to help you until you lose a statistically improbable amount of weight just to rule out that this might be flooding your basement, or is acting on the subconscious but deeply entrenched idea that people with your skin color are less susceptible to flooding and in less need of help, or believes that as a feeeemale you’re more likely to be suffering from emotional distress than a physical problem and suggests the preferable course of action would be for you to take a nap every time the supposed flooding in your basement bothers you.)

As I said in that post, pain and fatigue — like dysphoria — are qualitative experiences. This means they happen in your head and they cannot be directly observed or measured by anyone else (which would make them quantitative phenomena). 

The doctor talking to you about dysphoria —or pain or fatigue — is not a plumber in your house, they are a plumber on the phone. The only input they receive about the problem is your account of it. 

And if they’re not willing to listen to what you say and aren’t willing to take you at your word, then all the expertise and experience in the world doesn’t matter. You can have the most powerful calculator in the world but if you type the wrong numbers into it it will still give the wrong answers. Someone can be the best doctor in the world but if they’re ignoring the information they’re not going to give you the right answer.

Thx, @clinicallydepressedpug!

This is so good. I’d add, too, that in my experience, sometimes you are talking to the plumber because, well, your basement is full of water! OBVIOUSLY it’s your plumbing, right? I mean, something in your plumbing has to have ruptured for that to be like that, right?

… except what’s actually happened is that you have a secret aquifer off to one side of your basement, and the wall has exploded inward, and so a thing that no one is even looking at is causing the problem. Or maybe your sump pump failed and your cellar door is leaking water, so it’s a dead sump pump. 

But since you’re talking to a plumber, they’re like ‘WELP, I RAN ALL THE TESTS, THE PIPES ARE ALL FINE’ but your basement is still full of water and you’re like ???? But it’s not fine???? and they’re like I hope you don’t want any help with how uncomfortable it is having a basement full of water! Because you are clearly just doing this so that I will give you assistance with the symptoms here. 

So you can be telling the truth, but because a plumber is only focused on the plumbing, and the problem is not at all with the plumbing but with some other system within your house, they will miss the problem entirely, aka ‘when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’

Bless this post seriously. It’s a very good way of describing to healthy people what happens when you’re always sick and how you’re treated by medical professionals.

Like turning up to the ER with chest pains and being sent home with sleeping pills, only to be told two days later by another doctor “shit you’re asthmatic…how did they not see this?!”

But y'know, lets all assume doctors are all competent or even give a shit.

I once had an emergency room doctor say that a toddler who was already running a 104-degree (F) fever (that wasn’t responding to meds) could run a fever even higher and they’d be fine, it wasn’t dangerous to run a fever that high.

Except 107 degrees is fatal.

I told the nurses.  I hope they shoved something uncomfortable up his backside and then told him that he’d be fine, there was plenty of stretch, they could fit SO MUCH MORE up there and he needed to hold still.

This anecdote is related to OP’s post for the following reason:  DOCTORS CAN BE COMPLETE IMBECILES AND STILL HAVE MEDICAL DEGREES.

Or as the old joke goes: 

“What do you call the most academically successful graduate from medical school? 

Doctor. 

What do you call the person who almost flunked out of medical school but graduated anyway?

…Doctor.”

This. All of this. And then there are the plumbers (doctors) who say things like “Oh, you have a flooded basement? That’s an easy fix, I can just pour concrete into everything that might be letting water in. You’ll have to stop using your toilet and shower though, those’ll be blocked off too.”

And you’re like, “…Uh, no? That’s not a tradeoff I want to make. Can you fix it without breaking anything else?”

And their response might be, “Well, we could put in a sump pump instead, I guess. That would keep the water out, and you’d be able to use the basement to store some things as long as they were up on shelves, but the floor would be permanently damp and nobody wants that.”

“But I could live with that, better than blocking up all the plumbing! I think I’d rather have the sump pump than the concrete, please.”

“Are you sure? I could get your basement perfectly dry! Nobody really needs showers anyway, and you could just pee on the lawn.”

“No! That is not an acceptable compromise!”

“I’m starting to think you don’t really want your basement fixed, you know.”

—

Or their response could be something like, “Well, I suppose we could use Brand X caulk. That would stop the flooding without breaking your other plumbing. But you’ll have to keep reapplying it as long as you’re in the house, and Brand X caulk is occasionally addictive, you know. In some cases. Occasionally. If people put it on unbroken walls just because they feel like it, instead of using it to fix an actual problem.”

“But I have an actual problem, so that’s not my situation. Plus if I have to keep reapplying it forever anyway, what does it matter?”

“IT MATTERS. You know what, no caulk for you. Concrete or nothing.”

“But that makes things worse!”

“I’m going to put a note in your file saying you’re a caulk-seeker.”

—

(also I’m just going to point out that apparently anon thinks that doctors are better judges of WHETHER you are in pain or suffering from fatigue than you are. Not “what is causing it”. Whether you have it at all. WTF, anon?!)

When I was having serious fatigue problems as a teenager (not “I’m a little tired,” but “I don’t have enough energy to live”), my doctor ran a bunch of tests that didn’t show anything and then basically said, “Meh, I dunno.” I figured out, and fixed, the problem (protein deficiency from two years of vegetarianism) myself.

When I was having gynecological problems, also as a teenager, I went to a gynecologist who gave me a talk about how girls my age get worried about everything that happens down there but really it’s all perfectly normal. I found and fixed the problem myself. I’m not going to go into detail here, but I just want to note that the fix was ridiculously simple and could easily have been caught by a doctor who was paying attention.

When I was having chronic pain last year, I did research on my own and figured out the problem was likely to be a vitamin D deficiency. But because I wanted to get actual medical advice rather than relying on Google, I went to my doctor (a different doctor than the one I was seeing as a teenager). She tested me for a couple of different things, and added a vitamin D test because I brought it up. All the other tests came back fine. The vitamin D test came back low. I corrected the deficiency and the pain disappeared.

I’d really like to believe that doctors, with their years of training and experience, could figure out medical problems more easily than a layperson with a computer, but none of my experiences thus far have borne this out.

Adding to the gender discrimination side of the discussion: my mother has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, trigeminal neuralgia, and a few other chronic pain disorders that I can’t recall the names of right now. She’s been practically begging her doctor to prescribe her tramadol to manage the pain, but he wants to keep trying other methods.

Cut to me (a cis-male), discussing a diagnosis of mixed connective tissue disease and the joint pain that’s part of it with the same doctor. We talked about how effective the meloxicam he put me on was working. I told him it helped with the general pain, but ended up making the “added pain” (e.g. the pain that comes with working a high impact job with lots of heavy lifting and bending, and/or low pressure weather) worse because of the lower general pain. He tells me he’s going to give me tramadol to take once daily after work. Sight unseen, no other methods to try.

When I told my mom she was understandably frustrated.