What Patients Don’t Tell Their Doctors
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D., NYT
A patient’s wife was on the phone, her voice hesitant, unhappy. She didn’t bother with small talk. “I need to talk to you about Tom’s drinking,” she said.
Only the pure shock of the moment justifies the first words out of my mouth. “Tom? You’re kidding me,” said I.
Every family has a tortured soul in a closet whose door doesn’t quite close. The demons inside are all too visible to friends and family, neighbors and doormen, even the staff of the emergency room. To the outside world, though, not a hint of a problem displays, and that includes colleagues, clients and always, especially, the doctor.
It is an extraordinary phenomenon, this saving of face in the doctor’s office, amusing and distressing in equal parts, spilling into every kind of medical evaluation. At its most basic, it is the patient recovering from the flu who announces — we must hear it once a day — “I was so sick last week, I didn’t know what to do.” So where were you? “Oh, I didn’t want you to see me like that.”
(More here.)
A patient’s wife was on the phone, her voice hesitant, unhappy. She didn’t bother with small talk. “I need to talk to you about Tom’s drinking,” she said.
Only the pure shock of the moment justifies the first words out of my mouth. “Tom? You’re kidding me,” said I.
Every family has a tortured soul in a closet whose door doesn’t quite close. The demons inside are all too visible to friends and family, neighbors and doormen, even the staff of the emergency room. To the outside world, though, not a hint of a problem displays, and that includes colleagues, clients and always, especially, the doctor.
It is an extraordinary phenomenon, this saving of face in the doctor’s office, amusing and distressing in equal parts, spilling into every kind of medical evaluation. At its most basic, it is the patient recovering from the flu who announces — we must hear it once a day — “I was so sick last week, I didn’t know what to do.” So where were you? “Oh, I didn’t want you to see me like that.”
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home