Today I spoke to a coworker who had bad experiences with doctors and was seeking recommendations for a new one, then other coworkers chimed in, and so I decided to ask you guys as well. Well, not for a doctor recommendation, but about your bad experienced with doctors?

I’m gonna spoiler mine, because it makes me very uncomfortable, so perhaps it may make someone else very uncomfortable.

uncomfortable

I had a doctor who had no business in it make me show my intimate parts (I’m intersex) and she touched them. She was curious, I guess…? She’s a psychiatrist, so, again, literally 0 business doing so. I already have trauma from regular people who treat me like a circus display, I really had no need for someone with systemic power over me using it like that…

No, I didn’t report this. I was a teenager and barely functioning at the time. :/

  • girl@lemm.ee
    17·
    1 year ago

    I’ve had ~ a dozen minor bad experience with doctors and nurses, and one awful experience (still not as bad as assault).

    The worst one started with severe endometriosis pain, I was hyperventilating (without realizing it) for hours. My fingers eventually curled up and rendered my hands useless, which triggered a panic attack and more hyperventilating. I went to the ER because I had never experienced a loss of function in my hands before, it was terrifying. The nurse stuck me in a room and left me to my terror for hours, I cried and begged for someone to help me. Another nurse came by at some point, I heard them outside asking “is she okay?” and my main nurse just told them I was being stupid and needed to cry it out. She eventually came in to explain that hyperventilating causes a buildup of CO2 in the blood, which led to my fingers curling up, so I had to calm down for it to improve. She at no point offered me any kind of calmative, not even something basic like gabapentin. I eventually felt enough shame that I calmed down and went home.

    All the little experiences just fucked with my ability to trust my doctors (as individuals, not medicine as a whole). Doctors just blankly staring at me when I show them something they’ve never seen before, or telling me that the 3” tumor growing on my leg is “so small it’s almost nothing!” when they know I have a genetic mutation that severely limits my cells abilities to keep benign tumors from turning into cancer. I have a handful of health issues I need to go see doctors for again, but I have no confidence they won’t just tell me it’s all in my head again.

    Edit: oh yea, the most comical time was when a dentist gaslit me about basic human anatomy. I’m not a doctor but I have a B.S., I can read basic anatomy diagrams. I get really intense pain at the hinge of my jaw, right in front of my ears, when I eat something for the first time in a few hours. It’s definitely salivary stones. My dentist told me that salivary glands don’t exist there, so that can’t be it. Except they do. It’s pretty easy to figure that out lol. I asked her “okay, what else could it be then?” And she just grunted at me.