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If I had to guess, I’d bet that most people have lied to their doctor. Speaking for myself, sometimes it’s just easier. Now, I realize this is a stupid thing to do, but I guess I can take heart in recent news out of Dr. Barbara Korsch’s recent work out of the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine in knowing that I’m not alone.
In fact, Korsch, the author of The Intelligent Patient’s Guide to the Doctor-Patient Relationship, led Fox News to recently explore the greatest areas of whopperdom faced by physicians when trying to treat their patients.
1. Not taking prescribed medication correctly, completely, or … at all.
As embarrassing as it might be to admit it, “If you don’t tell us you’re skipping pills, we’ll assume you’re taking them and they aren’t working, so we might change the dosage or the prescription”—which may put off your recovery and cause side effects, says Laura Knobel, MD, a family physician in Walpole, Massachusetts, and a member of the board of directors for the American Academy of Family Physicians.
And when you toss antibiotics before you’re done with the full course, you may not kill off all the infectious bacteria in your body, leaving them resistant to drugs and possibly causing the illness to come back with greater force.
There’s a real science to pharmaceuticals, and the balance is often a dicey one. Doctors making sound medical decisions operate under …
… the assumption that you’re using (or have used) prescribed medication, and expecting them to keep on top of your health if you’re not keeping up with the script is like expecting a pilot to fly a plane with impaired vision.
2. Keeping your participation in the latest weight-loss craze on the downlow.
Any extreme diet—from those involving laxativesor stimulants to “healthier” versions (like juice fasts)—has its risks even if you’re in good shape and follow it for just a few days. You can become dehydrated and throw off your electrolyte balance, which can harm the heart and kidneys, for starters. “Cleanse diets can also strip you of micronutrients like magnesium and vitamin D,” says Dr. Pamela F. Gallin, author of How to Survive Your Doctor’s Care.
I don’t know if any of you remember the cabbage soup diet, but my mother and I used it a lot when I was in high school and the weight literally poured off. In retrospect, it was probably about as healthy as sustaining on lemon juice and cayenne pepper a la “The Cleanse”, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I suspect a doctor would have been mortified.
3. Being disingenuous about your sex life—past, present, and future.
When your doctor asks about your sexual partners, it’s not so she can judge your choices; it’s to assess your risk for STDs and to schedule appropriate screenings. Some types of human papillomavirus, for example, can lead to cervical cancer if not treated; untreated chlamydia can lead to infertility, and herpes can lie dormant but be passed on to your future babies, says Dr. Cheryl Iglesia, director of female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery at Washington Hospital Center, in Washington, D.C. That’s why it’s also crucial to tell your gyno if you or your partner have had an affair or you were once sexually assaulted.
I don’t talk about my sex life with my doctor, period. I get birth control, I get tested, and that’s it. Maybe it’s a lapsed Catholic thing, but this is a part of my life that stays private. I have never given a doctor numbers, never shared my sexual assault, and quite honestly I never intend to. Being in the medical field is sort of like being in education—part of your job is to maintain privacy (which is easy and goes without saying) and doing your best not to judge (which is, of course, pretty much impossible). I don’t intend to go there with a doctor.
4. Not letting your doc in on the medical skeletons in your familial closet.
If you have a family history of colon or breast cancer, for example, your doctor can advise you about screenings that could catch these scary diseases in their most treatable stages. And if depression, heart disease, or high blood pressure runs in your family, you can work out an action plan now for staying healthy down the road.
Knobel also points out that when a doctor’s questions seem to come from left field—like asking about depression when you’re suffering from back pain—there’s usually a method to the seeming madness. Your symptoms could be caused by a not-so-obvious condition, and your family history may point your doc in the right direction.
For awhile, I was embarrassed to trumpet the existence of everything from alcoholism to anorexia within my family’s ranks to my doctor, but I got over it. It really is important stuff for your doc to know.
5. Seeing another medical provider without letting your regular doc into the loop.
If you’re seeing two doctors at the same time, things can get dicey. “You need to tell each one what the other one is doing,” Dr. Gallin says. “They need to be able to share test results, make sure there aren’t any bad drug interactions, and ensure that their treatments work together.” That’s true whether you “cheat” with a traditional doctor or an alternative healer.
“We need to know what you’ve tried,” says Dr. Knobel, who adds that it’s often easier to get reimbursed for tests, such as MRI, if a patient has already tried physical therapy or a chiropractor. “Think of your main doctor as your home base, the one who keeps track of everything,” Knobel says. “If you’re not comfortable sharing all that information with her, then you may want to look for another doctor.”
And there you go.
Until I developed a fairly serious medical condition, I always thought of going to the doctor as kind of a necessary evil, a signature on the birth control prescription and the guy to call when you need an antibiotic called in for a sinus infection.
Through my battle with chronic pancreatitis, however, I’ve gained a whole new respect for and appreciation of my doctors and am consequently pretty open with them.
Do you always tell your doctor the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
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Dunno, it’s never really occurred to me to not be honest with my doctor. Seems a bit stupid, really, seeing as you’re paying them to take care of your health.
I lie only when it’s convenient.
This is timely, I have an appointment with a new doctor Friday. I plan to be honest….if she asks the right questions. And I promise not to grab her by the throat and yell GIVE ME SOME CHANTIX AND REFILL MY LODRANE NOW!!
I never lie to my doctor. She’s both a family physician and an OB/GYN so she’s comfortable with all facets of my health. She doesn’t ask me prying questions about my sex life, she just asks if I want to be tested for the full STD panel, and I always say yes. She knows I smoke weed to relieve medical symptoms (I have extreme nausea due to something called cyclical vomiting syndrome, and not even the meds they give pregnant women and chemo patients help), and recreationally. She knows all of my medical history because even when I’m referred to a specialist, I make sure she knows what that doc had to say and I have her handle all of my medications (less chance something will get fucked up or cause drug interactions that way). She also knows my life plans, how I’m doing in school, my family medical history, etc.
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Doctors aren’t here to judge. Chances are, whatever you’re not divulging is no big deal to them. If you don’t feel comfortable discussing things with your doctor, perhaps you need a new doctor. But not being honest can be dangerous. You never know when something you think is inconsequential could actually be a significant symptom of a larger problem that needs to be taken care of promptly.
Agreed
I’ve seen a lot of terrible doctors. The biggest issue I come across is doctors who are unwilling to listen to me when I describe what’s going on. As I only go to a doctor when I have a problem, it can be very frustrating.
I understand how a doctor can grow jaded after listening to enough people convinced they are dying, but I’ve had doctors fail to notice a major laceration (or listen when I told him it existed), and tell me I have my lungs mixed up with my sinuses (the difference between an infection in one or the other is very evident).
Thus, I tell a doctor exactly what I need to in order to get what I’m there for. That’s it.
@Kai, I absolutely detest when my doctors can’t leave a subject well enough alone when it’s obvious that they are incorrect. I figured out that the migraines I get were caused by a sinus infection and posture problems, mostly of my own accord and because I independently got a physical therapist. My doctor was convinced that it either had to do with my caffeine consumption or that it had to do with my birth control because b.c. was the easy assumption. Lost 2 years wrestling with that shit.
My lungs were filling up with goop, and the doctor diagnosed a sinus infection. Anyone who has ever had a sinus infection understands that you can’t get it confused with anything else. You KNOW when there’s something in your sinuses. Mine were fine. I came back a week later to tell her the drugs didn’t work and I felt exactly the same as before, and she tells me it has now *moved* into my lungs. urgh.
It has since become a recurring problem. I don’t know what it is, and I’ve only had one plausible explanation from a doctor, but I know what drug fixes it, so I get to go in and just try to convince someone to prescribe it for me. I’ve been lucky enough to not have too much trouble.
My allergy to wasp stings on the other hand, has been declared both ‘an infection, not an allergy’, and ‘perfectly normal’. That might start to be a problem if I decide I want to start carrying an epi-pen.
When I was around 14, I had a doctor who insisted that my propensity to get sick and miss school at least once a month after going through a really rough bout with mono was “just a a phase” for three years. Three years of misery and missing probably 100 days of school later, I was told by a school nurse that I have very enlarged, pitted tonsils and she was surprised they weren’t making me uncomfortable. I has suspected for a long time that my tonsils had a lot to do with my frequent sinus and throat infections, but my doctor still insisted I was “growing” and in a “phase”. I enlisted an ENT doctor who was hesitant to remove my tonsils because he didn’t think they were bad enough. Finally, after maybe 3 episodes of tonsilitis in as many months during my freshman year of college, a pus pocket in my tonsil burst and I started spitting up blood. I was pissed off enough by then to call up the ENT and insist he operate. Lo and behold, as soon as I got my tonsils out, I suddenly had an immune system and I get sick far, far less often.
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It IS frustrating when doctors think that because they hold a medical degree, they know more about your body than you do, even though you live in it every day. I’m sure they have to deal with uninformed people a lot, but even so, it’s not an excuse to completely ignore a patient’s concerns, especially if that patient has taken the time to document or research those concerns. I really think finding a good doctor that you know you communicate with well is important. If it doesn’t feel like a good fit, or you feel devalued, you have no obligation to keep seeing someone who treats you as a list of symptoms instead of a human being.
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Kai – you might want to get another opinion on the lung thing. If it keeps coming back, you may not be completely getting rid of the infection, just weakening it so that you feel better for a while. A higher dose of whatever you’re taking, or a different regimen in the same family should be able to knock out the infection completely so that it doesn’t come back. This happened to me a lot in the past with a few different types of infections. Your doctor should be taking the recurring part seriously.
Again Shannon…100% agreed. I had my bouts with Doctors for 15 years now. I’ve gone into the detail in the past so I won’t again, but if I would have listened to my current doctors I would be dead of beast cancer now instead of 8 years cancer free. Also finding a good doctor that understands the problems the chemo has caused me was a long struggle.
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Kai, Shannon is correct, don’t let this go…I just talked to a women who couldn’t catch her breathand was in a lot of pain. Multiple doctor visits were dismissed because she is a smoker. Low and behold, 3 weeks later she coughed out a nut of some sort that she somehow inhaled into her lung! That story is way out there, but something is amiss with your lungs, and you know it…follow through and get to the bottom of it before permenant damage can be done.
Sorry, those doctors are not my “current” doctors anymore.
That’s craziness! a nut rattling around in your lungs?!
I have a story to top it, a friend of my mothers had really really foul breath and was sick all the time…this went on for 12 years before they found out that somehow a piece of pine tree had gotten into his lungs and fused with the wall of his lung…that sucker was completely alive in him after 12 years.
Oh, I’ve had multiple opinions. Been to a number of doctors of differing usefulness since then (though all better than the first), and had some different ideas. it’s not actually an infection.
What one doctor suggested which makes some sense, is that it’s a lung issue vaguely related to asthma, where my lungs overreact to small issues. So I’ll get a bit of a cold or something, and where everyone’s body produces mucous to fight it off, my body goes into super-overdrive, and produces way too much. And often continues to do so even after the original bug is long gone. So my lungs end up full of crap. That doctor said there isn’t really anything much to do about it other than try not to get sick in the first place (smart), and use the drugs that fix it when it does happen – again, much like asthma.
It seems to fit, and I haven’t heard a better theory, so it’s what I’m going with.
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Sadly, ‘find a better doctor’ is not an easy thing to do in Canada. We have a massive shortage of doctors, since most of them have moved to the states where they actually get paid.
In my city, nearly every doctor is full up. the city maintains lists, and generally it’s pretty lucky if there are a couple doctors accepting new patients at any given time. there have been times where there is literally not a single doctor accepting patients, other than if you are lucky enough to have an ‘in’ somewhere.
So i’ve seen a lot of walk-ins. My university health clinic was great for letting you just treat the whole place (with multiple doctors) as your own, but it’s only for students.
The US would do well to take a clear look at the places the Canadian Heath Care System fails before idealizing it. As it tries to set up some sort of public healthcare, it should learn from the mistakes of others and try to do better.