It’s always amazing to me how quick folks can be to offer advice. Unwanted advice. Medical advice. Near strangers jump at the chance to give input without a second thought. Isn’t everyone quick to judge a doctor they’ve never met, particularly when the doctor is treating something they’ve never even heard of? What does this say about me? When someone does this to me, they are basically telling me that my doctor is an idiot. That means I must be an idiot for selecting him out of the myriad of choices available to me. But, I know I’m not. And I’ve never figured out what to say in such circumstances. What goes through my mind is always the same thing … How dare you!
During my most recent experience, I was shopping at a local vitamin store over the weekend for some Vitamin D. I have had Vitamin D insufficiency for years, and take a daily supplement as a result. At the checkout, the salesperson tried to convince me to purchase a multi-vitamin product currently on promotion. My response was designed to get him off my back, but it was also true and honest. I told him, “I wouldn’t start taking anything new without asking my doctor if he approves of the product first.” Next, the snake oil salesman responds with, “If your doctor doesn’t tell you to take this, then I would find another doctor!” Seriously? Does he have any idea how inappropriate that off-handed comment is? This guy probably has a high school diploma. He works a sales counter at a small retail store in the local mall. His medical education probably consists of reading promotional flyers on the products he sells. My doctor, on the other hand, is board certified in family medicine with decades of experience. Why would I take a cashier’s medical advice over my doctor’s? Of course, I wouldn’t. How dare he think that I would.
As I sat in my office at the university last year, a pre-med student in one of my classes came in to talk to me about an essay she was writing. I’d had no breaks between student appointments all morning and was behind schedule. I was late taking my morning meds, as well. I decided to take a second before starting a conversation with that student and take the meds. As I opened a pill container, I swung my chair around to grab a drink from the small fridge in the corner of my office. As I turned back around, the student was peering into the pill container, trying to count the pills. She told me that I took way too much medicine and suggested that I needed to find a doctor that wasn’t so “pill happy.” What looked like a large handful of pills only contained one prescription item. The rest of the pills were a few Tylenol (it was a good guess that I would need something for a headache with 23 back-to-back student appointments on my agenda that day), vitamin supplements, and an antacid. Not that it was any of her business. I would have never told her what I was taking. Only my husband and my doctor have the right to ask me that question. Not an 18-year-old freshman pre-med student with no knowledge of my medical history and no actual medical training herself. How dare she think that I needed medical advice from her.
Sometimes these situations are driven by the need to feel helpful. A little over a year ago, I had a miscarriage. I was 9-weeks pregnant, and it had been a fairly arduous battle just to get pregnant in the first place. Even though it was very early in my pregnancy, a fair amount of people did know. A large group of people, men and women, at my church knew I was pregnant and that I had miscarried. The first time I reappeared after this horrific event, I was surrounded by well-meaning friends offering support and prayers. But that’s not all they were offering. Slowly, throughout the evening meeting, I had amassed a collection of doctor referrals. Unsolicited, one by one, I was approached by well-meaning folks that handed me business cards or wrote down a doctor’s name or phone number on a scrap of paper for me. Each one came with a story. My daughter-in-law finally had a successful pregnancy after switching to this doctor. The stories each had a different cast of characters, but the same message: “You need a new doctor.” None of them knew who my doctor was. He could have been the doctor whose name was on that scrap of paper they were handing me for all they knew. Now, there are lots of uncertainties about why I miscarried, but the one thing I am confident in is that my doctor was in no part responsible for my miscarriage. I do not believe that I would now have a 4-month old infant if only I’d have had a different doctor, a better doctor, one of the doctors whose names were on those business cards and scraps of paper. How dare they suggest that my doctor was responsible for something that only God can control.
So, what makes people, near strangers even, feel comfortable telling someone else to ditch their doctor? Choosing a doctor is a personal decision. I would argue it’s one of the most personal decisions we make. That makes the advice equally personal and all the more inappropriate.
Kris Byrd is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. Her research interests are health communication and media studies, and she blogs at Everyday Life Narratives.
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