How to Talk to Your Doctor: Tips to Get the Care You Need
Image courtesy of Priscilla Du Preez via Unsplash.
I’ve had a strongly hit-or-miss experience referring my clients to other healthcare providers. Many have gone to other caregivers and received such advice as, “there’s nothing I can do to help until it gets worse.” Or, they’ve been outright dismissed despite clear and present symptoms (a more frequent occurrence for my female clients).
Because I know how hard it can be to have a conversation with any new healthcare provider, I’m sharing my tips for how to talk to your doctor. These guidelines can make any provider-patient interaction just a little smoother, so you can have the opportunity to receive the consideration and care that you deserve.
Full disclosure: I’m a 30-something white male with no discernible accent. It’s an unfortunate truth that I have and will experience significantly fewer incidence of being talked down to, or dismissed for my concerns by any professional, especially in healthcare. This paradigm is certainly changing, but it’s far from being resolved.
Remember That It’s Not All Your Responsibility
This should be obvious, but the doctor-patient relationship is not all on you. Caregivers are responsible for creating a safe environment for you to voice concerns, ask questions, and receive helpful insights and treatment for things that feel private, uncomfortable, and sometimes scary. That’s on us.
That sometimes doesn’t happen in today’s healthcare system. And that’s not on you.
The following steps are here to guide you when you seek help for your health and receive less-than-stellar service.
Before Your Visit: Set Yourself Up for Success
Ask for Recommendations
Seeking a provider through the recommendation of a friend or advisor, or another doctor can go a long way toward establishing trust and calming your mind before you ever set foot in a clinic. It can remove a lot of the feelings of uncertainty associated with working with any new professional, especially one with whom you are about to share a lot of personal information.
Acknowledge Your Preferences
Would you prefer a male or female provider? Don’t underestimate your response to this question, or feel bad for having a preference. Many people have an easier time trusting one gender over another because of past experiences and traumas. That’s okay. Healthcare is personal and can only be successful if you feel comfortable with your provider.
Prep Your Questions Ahead of Time...
I have a confession: Dr. Google is my favorite frenemy. It’s the bane of my existence with my more anxious patients, but it can be the saving grace of people who have had demeaning and/or unhelpful medical experiences in the past. Use Google searches to explore options and form questions that you can ask your provider in your office visit.
… But Try Not to Self-Diagnose
My Googling advice comes with a caveat: Do your best not to self-diagnose or catastrophize. Treat this as idea exploration, rather than an effort to make a single conclusion for yourself. Google will indiscriminately show you the more likely mundane scenarios and the more rare serious diseases without context. Applying context to symptoms is actually one of the prime functions of a trained medical provider in diagnosing and caring for health conditions, so bring your informed questions, but be open to your doctor’s evaluation.
If you’re prone to spinning out on worst case scenarios, then grab a buddy. Your google-search buddy should be the calm, grounded type who can apply their rational brain to help you differentiate between a mundane tension headache and a brain-eating parasite that you clearly contracted from a country you’ve never been to. (Can you tell I work with a lot of anxious, self-diagnosing people? Healthcare students and providers themselves are actually super prone to this.)
During the Interaction: Act Confident
View Your Provider on Your Level, As Your Equal
I’m going to let you in on a secret: Doctors are just people. Yes, they’re people who have spent a ridiculous amount of time and money on schooling, but they’re human, nevertheless. A doctorate is only a degree. It does not absolve us of personality defects, oversights, insecurities, or horrible, rotten, no-good days.
Go into each doctor-patient interaction as if you were having a meeting with any other professional service provider. Don’t allow them to talk to you in any way that you wouldn’t allow your plumber or auto mechanic talk to you. They should show you the respect of explaining their thoughts and leave space for you to explain your needs.
Use Your Body Language as a Power Tool
Discussions about your health, medical examinations, and physical body work can all feel very intimate, vulnerable, and/or invasive. Those feelings often cause people to take on low-power body language—shoulders rounded forward, head down, often using arms to cover the chest or abdomen—which can sap you of more of your energy and confidence.
Try sitting or standing up with your shoulders relaxed, your head up (as though you’re being pulled up toward the ceiling by a string attached to the crown of your head), and your arms relaxed by your side. This will allow your breath to be fuller and more relaxed, your muscles to be less tense, and can even lower your stress hormones.
Upright and open body language is highly associated with feelings of confidence and more productive and satisfying social interactions. Not only will it help you keep yourself feeling good, but it will subconsciously trigger people around you (in this case, your provider) that you are a confident, in-control person who is to be treated with respect.
Troubleshooting: What to Say When You Don’t Feel Heard
“Here’s how you can help me.”
Go into the interaction knowing what you’re seeking and ask for it. If you have splitting headaches and all you want is a quick fix so you can think straight, that’s a very different conversation from aiming to understand them and explore options for preventing them. Neither option is right or wrong. Both have very real and necessary places in healthcare, and being clear about what you want and need will help you get the care you deserve.
“That makes me feel uncomfortable.” / “That seems inappropriate.”
This is a key to communication, as is understanding the context of your doctor-patient conversation. Many provider-patient interactions are full of uncomfortable topics that can include sex, bowel movements, and potentially scary diagnoses. Those conversations can be pivotal to making a proper diagnosis and providing the care you’re looking for.
That being said, there are definitely comments and actions that are inappropriate—and it’s your right to call them out when they happen.
If you feel you have a legitimate concern and are being dismissed, that is inappropriate.
If your provider refuses to help you explore your care options or insists that you must follow their prescribed treatment, that is inappropriate.
If you feel it was an honest mistake, you can follow it up with this caring question.
“Is everything alright with you?”
Doctors are people too. We make mistakes and have bad days. A doctor-patient interaction shouldn’t be focussed on the needs of the doctor, but this simple Jedi mind trick can quickly shift the dynamic of any interaction that has gone sideways.
The provider may apologize and immediately correct their behavior (most of us work very hard to keep our personal ups and downs from interfering with our work), but they may not. And that can be a sign you don’t want to work with them. If that’s the case, remember the following.
It’s your right to walk out. It’s your right to seek better help.
This is a “break glass in case of emergency” action, but can be crucial to getting you the help that you deserve. There are thousands of healthcare providers in any major city. If you should come across one who will not help you in the way that you need, or treats you with disrespect, it is your right to end that meeting without warning or apology.
This is something that never crosses the minds of most people who sit in the patient seat of a doctor’s office. But, you do not have to receive care that you don’t want, or work with a doctor who tears you down, or makes you feel uncomfortable or unheard.
Remember: Your provider does not hold authority over you or your body. You do. It’s our job to help, not demand or mandate your care.
If you are having a hard time finding a healthcare provider with whom you can have a productive and respectful interaction, please reach out to me. I have an ever growing network of healthcare providers of all types around the Twin Cities (I’ve taken to vetting every professional referral I make with at least a phone call prior to my client’s first visit with a new provider). Chances are good that we can find someone who will work for you and help you figure out what’s really going on with your health.