Why I wait until I’m nearly 40 years old to develop allergies, I don’t know. But, whatever, that’s the case.
So I go to an allergist. He calls me into his office. Not the examining room, mind you. But the room where he has his desk and his degrees. He pulls out a sheet of paper and he starts to go over my family history with me, since I’m a new patient.
He asks questions about what has prompted the visit, and as I speak there’s total eye contact when he’s not taking notes and he’s nodding. He appears to be hanging on my every word.
I find myself watching the clock more than he is. I am, after all, programmed to feel hurried in a doctor’s office. You know the routine: You make a mental (if not real) list of all the questions you want to ask, all the things you want to say, and you’re prepared to address each in rapid-fire succession.
But, oddly, there’s no need here.
I’m sitting in the office going through my list–along with whining about how I’m never, ever sick–and I’m feeling completely uninhibited by the clock. In fact, the whole visit, even the examination, is of the same ilk.
Then, the next day, totally out of the blue, the allergist calls to make sure I’m clear on everything I need to do. He calls. Not an assistant.
Thankfully, I’ve been pretty healthy and haven’t had much of a reason to hang out in doctors’ offices for myself. But I have been interacting with doctors more lately as relatives have been dealing with various illnesses.
The experience with the allergist has been far from typical.
Right now, the country is engaged in a great debate over whether to impose limits on medical malpractice lawsuits.
Data show that when doctors listen, appear to be empathetic and really care, patients are far less likely to file spurious malpractice claims when things go wrong.
That just makes sense.
It’s true that there are those patients who only seek to milk the system. But I don’t think that’s the case for most people. From the start, most patients just want to feel like they’re being heard. They want to believe that the doctor sees them as being more than the sum total of their maladies.
As I said, lately I’ve become a bit more of an authority on doctors and hospital stays. My sudden expertise has come mostly from sitting in those uncomfortable chairs beside the beds of sick, elderly family members.
Here are a few suggestions that are not necessarily groundbreaking but I think are worth repeating:
– Because cleanliness indeed is next to godliness, we are forever grateful when doctors and other staffers wash their hands before traveling from one patient to another.
– We’re grateful when doctors’ offices and even hospitals, including those that crow about top rankings, are neat and clean.
– Since we are expected to arrive on time for our appointments, we appreciate it when doctors do the same. When something knocks the schedule off-kilter, and we understand that’s possible, a simple “I apologize for being late” suffices in most cases.
– It’s helpful when doctors read their patient’s charts before interacting. (A digression: One doctor, at one of the city’s top-ranked hospitals, told us a couple of times that he had “informed the patient” of something. Well, that’s not helpful if the patient has some dementia, which he would have known had he read her chart.)
– We’re grateful when staffers–those at the nurse’s station in the hospital as well as at the front desk in a doctor’s office–keep their personal conversations to themselves.
– Also, doctors should assume that patients and family members have good sense, until they prove otherwise. And we as patients, or the loved ones of patients, should assume the same thing of doctors, until they prove otherwise.
I know, I know. Dealing with us patients isn’t a picnic. We enter doctors’ offices and hospitals saddled with our information off the Internet, and we make our demands. We can be surly.
Sometimes, we expect too many miracles.
And yet, we also expect the little things. I rave about my experience with the allergist because he simply spent time with me. He listened. And it wasn’t just me. I watched him care for other patients in a similar way.
If it had been an ordinary experience, I probably wouldn’t have said a word.
———-
dtrice@tribune.com
