“What Is Something A Doctor Completely Ignored You Telling Them About When Clearly There Was Something Wrong?” (19 Answers)

To get a better understanding of why these things happen, it's important to hear out the other side as well. General practitioner, medical researcher, and founder of PrimeHealth Clinical Research, Iris Gorfinkel, M.D., told Bored Panda that there is a number of problems doctors face at work that interfere with helping people. For example, some assume that doctors are more connected than they are, especially in Canada.

"I can't speak for every health system, but the bureaucracy and trying to connect points on a graph that don't necessarily easily connect, that's one big challenge," Gorfinkel said. "Patients often assume that we know more than what we do actually know about all the services that are available. And the truth is, there are a lot of services, and I'm happy as a family doctor to refer to those services and don't pretend to know where they all are."

A second issue—and a huge one—is the time. "Typical family practice appointment might be 15 minutes, and a lot of the time ... that's not nearly enough. Time is a big constraint, and when it runs out, patients get frustrated. And in truth, I'm frustrated as well, not having the time that I always need."

Plus, some things are simply not within a doctor's control. Those are called the social determinants of health. "A person's occupation, a person's income, a person's educational level, we know that these are major determinants of how well we'll do physically and emotionally," Gorfinkel said. "Trying to meet them some way midway, especially when there are educational or cultural barriers, sometimes language barriers, they can be big challenges."

The fourth thing is the disease itself; sometimes it just doesn't have any cures. "I think one of the greatest things a doctor can do for a patient when faced with a challenge of an incurable condition is having that patient take on the perspective of running toward the light," Gorfinkel said. It's a perspective she also tries to share with her own patients.

"You have two attitudes in medicine. The first is, 'I'm afraid of disease, I'm terrified of getting sick.' This is ultimately what we all suffer from, right? We don't want to be sick alone. We don't want to die alone, and in pain, those are huge fears. But is there a better way to live our lives to make the most of the time we have? I call that running toward the light. In other words, why do you do healthy things, it's not just so that you won't get sick, it is so that you will live better today."

The last thing Gorfinkel highlighted was stress. Burnout. A lack of life balance. According to her, many of the advances we've made in modern medicine—for example, electronic medical records—pulled doctors away from their patients.

"We used to look in the eyes of our patients and take their history, we used to place our hands on their body in order to understand what it was actually saying to us. And this, unfortunately, is rapidly becoming a lost art."

Gorfinkel is really sorry about that because, in her mind, these are healing acts. "Doctors are spending—and this is actually a thing—80 to 90% of their time staring at a computer screen. So I ask you, is that necessarily healing?"

"If the problem is simplistic, yes, perhaps it could be done that way. But being the old school person that I am, I think the greatest healing is not done that way. It is still done with contact. I'm talking about contact on every level so that we can better understand one another; the psychological level, the spiritual level, the physical level..."

However, sometimes things go wrong. To err is human. When Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon in Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wrote of his own medical mistake, he noted that while healthcare can make "dramatic improvements", there is still human fallibility to contend with.

"No matter what measures are taken, doctors will falter, and it isn’t reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it."

Gorfinkel explained that the vast majority of mistakes that a doctor makes never gets out of their head.

"People are not going to know the majority of mistakes a doctor makes. And that's because most of these mistakes don't need to be known," she said. "They're relatively minor. They don't necessarily have an impact on a patient's health."

They may be mistakes on how something is documented—that's probably by far the most common error—and they may be mistakes that could've been but weren't. For example, a doctor sends a wrong dose to a pharmacy and the pharmacy then calls them to correct that.

These things usually happen under the radar; the patient doesn't necessarily even know they happened.

But Gorfinkel said there are other errors that are important. Ones that have to be brought out into the open and discussed with the patient.

"The error of misdiagnosis, the error of landing on a diagnosis too quickly, the error of interrupting a patient to not fully understand their experience—these are all common errors too," the doctor said. "The best way around [these mistakes], as far as I can see, is open communication, talking about [the issue] so that things can get better in the future. [In these cases,] we can't change what was in the past, but we can change what plays out for future visits."

Ultimately, the best reaction to these situations probably comes from the doctor themself who says 'How can I do better?' Their internal motivation to strive for perfection is what makes things better.

"Yes, there are external bodies that oversee ... but generally, they're there for really egregious mistakes," Gorfinkel said.

This brings us to the worst medical errors. The ones that weren't solved by speaking to the doctor. If something really bad happens, patients can talk to the licensing body of the doctor.

"My personal view is there is a way to improve things. And that's to make sure that both parties have a chance to sit down together. This is really the way it should be," Gorfinkel added.

"I have made mistakes. More than I want to think about actually. And I would like to think that these mistakes were chances for me to grow, both in terms of my knowledge, and in terms of how I practice medicine."

If something tragic happens to a patient, there is a chance to use their horrible experience to help others. To improve the way their (and other) doctors practice medicine. It may not sound like much, but it's something. And something is better than nothing.

"When people are looking to sue a doctor, they're really upset about an error that was made. And rightly so," Gorfinkel said. "One of the things they look for is restitution in terms of is that going to change how things are going to be for someone else in the future. That is actually one of the key things we're looking for."

As the doctor pointed out, outsiders often think these people are looking for money, they just want a suit. Actually, a lot of the time, that's not true.

"What they want more is to know that that same error will not be made in the future. That the doctor has learned from their mistake, and that there will be systems in place to protect others from having to walk that same path."