Fortunately, after a brief skirmish, I seem to have gained the upper hand in the battle against my internal organs, at least until they learn to read and find out the mean stuff I’ve said about them.
As a medical professional and a medically complicated human this is very important to me
That’s not wrong.
These are both true
Both are very very true.
These are both true, but more importantly, not mutually exclusive!
Say a patient comes in with chest pain. First time they’ve ever had chest pain. They say they googled it, and clearly they have cancer now!
…no. That’s the first example.
But say a patient has chest pain, they’ve had chest pain for 10 years, every previous doctor has checked for all the obvious causes, and nothing changes.
That’s a completely different scenario. In the first example, the patient doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The condition is new, their knowledge is limited. That’s why we have doctors. But in the second example, the patient is the expert, and the doctor is the one who’s new to the situation. The patient has done all this before, and is very familiar with the pain (condition, etc.) that they have. The doctor is not the one with 10 years of experience. They need to listen, because the patient actually has something they don’t know to add to the conversation.
These two things are not mutually exclusive, they are not the same scenario, and both doctors and patients (but mostly doctors) need to learn to tell the difference and know when to talk, and when to listen.
This is also *highly* relevant to anti-vaxers.
There is a reason that the entire section on dysthymia in my psychology textbooks is basically “this person has been living with this for years longer than you will ever have researched it. help them facilitate their own coping strategies.”
