Today I want to talk about a sense of entitlement doctors have. They go through a ton of training and typically have a ton of experience in the serious domain of health and life and death decisions. They also need to cut through nonsense and get their assessments and directions heard and followed. So it's understandable that they can seem a little commanding or dismissive.

However, I've found that most of them go a bit too far, in that they assume you know nothing, and assume they know everything there is to know - or everything that matters in the circumstances - or at least try hard to give that impression, to a fault - after they've made a diagnosis. I can't count how many times I've understood things a doctor apparently didn't about a condition I had, a medication I was taking, etc. Now, as a teacher, I know that often it's better to start off assuming your listener knows nothing, and give them kind of "bonus points," if you will, if they do happen to know more, and adjust on the fly accordingly. Maybe I'm at fault here, too, for listening too politely and patiently to details I already had in my pocket. And of course, you and I should both be careful to wonder whether I knew those other, additional things, or only had an opinion, and might be getting ahead of myself. But even when I have pulled out a fact that is known by the medical community at large, for example a direction about how to take a medication, I've found doctors who didn't know this thing talking down to me, telling me only the most basic stuff I found out months or years ago googling, and acting as if (or telling me outright) they would certainly have heard about it if anything even remotely like XYZ were true. But if they were more interested in listening, if they showed more curiosity, I might demonstrate otherwise. Instead, they come across as authoritarian, closed-minded, presumptuous, and condescending.

I know they're trying to help. They're trying to do their job. But the trouble is that their opinion, however they choose to present it, is ultimately also an opinion. It's true that they need to take a tone that gets them listened to. Maybe the real problem here would be all the patients who are too foolish to know what's good for them when it's told to them point-blank. But not everyone is a fool to be goaded, or a total layperson with no facility for research, skepticism, objectivity, etc. In the end, most of the medical treatment I've received has come from myself, and I've worked out a great many things that fly or don't fly for me, and more often than not, I've been able to diagnose my own issues, much the way I've been able to figure out what was wrong with my MacBooks before taking them in for repairs I didn't want to risk doing myself. It's only an opinion until the repair is accomplished and everything works again. Then it isn't an opinion but a fact.

In the case of medicine rather than computers, it isn't so cut and dry, but you either have a migraine or you don't, for example. So - that the turmeric extract called Meriva works to cut off headaches before they become migraines (at least very often) is not an opinion, it's a fact I rely on in my daily life. No doctor told me about that. In fact, I don't do anything for my migraines that a doctor told me about. Everything I do to treat my migraines I learned on my own, through the internet and trial and error. That isn't because I haven't talked to at least a dozen doctors about migraines.

All the medically supervised interventions turned out not to be effective or sustainable. That or I already knew about them. It's nice to get another prescription for ibuprofen, I suppose, but I know what ibuprofen is, and in the end, 800 mg pills aren't the way I use it, so while it seems official and supportive and validating, it doesn't help my particular condition. In fact, I think the 800 mg ibuprofen prescriptions I've gotten - dozens of them? - are a good example of my relationship with doctors. It's friendly. I listen. Sometimes they listen as well as I would like. But I keep feeling that I know more than they do on this topic, and I'm the one listening, and they only listen here and there and jump to conclusions I've already superseded, and unlike me, they feel a sense of finality in their opinion which, on the objective criterion, they have not earned, because they just aren't right.

I could not have treated cancer on my own. Doctors and nurses and technicians and other staff saved my life when I had cancer, and it was a very complicated and involved a course of treatments that lasted the better part of a year. For that I am endlessly grateful. This post is not meant to undercut the medical establishment. It is meant to comment on human fallibility.