By S Suzanne Fisher

Mechanics fix cars; fire fighters put out fires; garbage collectors collect garbage. Doctors, however, practice medicine. This has always made me wonder when (or if), after all that practicing, doctors ever actually ‘get it right.’

The first area in which doctors are still practicing is in the waiting rooms outside their sacrosanct treatment rooms, from which patients are barred until their names are called. There sick patients sit, groaning in a room stuffed with way too many people, sharing germs with everyone else, and waiting anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours for their scheduled appointments. That’s because most patients do not know the secret to being seen on time in a doctor’s office.

The trick to getting in to see the doctor is taking him (or her) free drugs. Ever notice how the pharmaceutical company sales people come in without an appointment, and are hurried in to see the good doctor long before your name is ever called? In fact, sometimes you sit in the waiting room in a doctor’s office for so long that spontaneous healing takes place. Although you may be tempted to get up and leave, don’t bother because you will be charged for not being there as well as for being there.

Be prepared for your next doctor’s visit. Spend some time beforehand sitting outside a medical building, and make a deal with the first pharmaceutical sales person you see to take all his or her drug samples. Then, the next time you have a scheduled doctor’s appointment, enter, sign in, and announce that you have free drugs. You will be seen immediately, thus avoiding the usual long wait.

Once you get into the treatment room, you may be told to disrobe by a nurse who discretely leaves so you can take off your clothes and wrap yourself in a piece of paper with holes for your head and arms that might actually fit if you were an extremely large two-dimensional paper doll. Do not disrobe for the first 15 minutes after the nurse leaves. Otherwise, you will be sitting there shivering, minimally clothed from the waist up with your more private areas hidden only with a small sheet that wouldn’t even fit on a dog’s bed.

Timing is everything here, though – make sure you wait only 15 minutes before disrobing. That gives you 5 minutes to undress and another 5 minutes to try to rescue your departing dignity before your doctor actually comes into the treatment room. As I said, proper timing is critical. If you end up making the doctor wait even half a second because you are not ready, he or she will go on to the next patient, and you will lose your turn. The next time the doctor opens your door may be hours later.

Once your doctor is actually in the treatment room with you, do not answer the doctor’s perfunctory, “How are you?” with “Fine, thank you, doctor.” Chit chat only wastes part of the five minutes the doctor has allotted for fixing your problems. Say instead, “my head, back, or neck hurts.”

Describe your symptoms only. Do not under any circumstances let your doctor think that you have any inkling of what your medical problems are. Doctors do not like to deal with patients who are knowledgeable about their own symptoms. Avoid saying things like, “I believe in being a partner in my own healing.” Get used to it – the only way you will ever be your doctor’s partner is if you graduate from medical school and get board certified.

You might even want to reinforce your medical ignorance by saying things like, “It hurts when I urinate, could that be indigestion?” Doctors love to explain in great detail how your body works to you. Even though you have lived in your body for a goodly number of years (since birth at least), do not assume that your knowledge of your body’s inner workings will be tolerated by your doctor. Patient knowledge equates in the minds of doctors with potential lawsuits for malpractice (there is that practice concept again).

As you sit there describing your symptoms, you will notice that your doctor appears to be taking notes. He isn’t. He is actually doodling in your chart while he decides which drug to prescribe. Figuring out what is actually causing your medical problem takes more than the allotted five minutes you have with your doctor. The quickest and easiest way the doctor can fix your problem within the allotted five minutes and move on to the next patient is to give you a drug. This is the part of your treatment that your doctor really finds challenging and fun, much more fun that listening to sick people like you complain all day.

Thanks to the many drug sales reps, your doctor has lots of drug samples and information on a wide variety of drugs. While he saves the samples for his staff, for you, the patient, he is always willing to write a prescription. He has become a legalized drug pusher, and he takes full advantage of his ability to enrich the pharmaceutical companies. After all, he owns stock in most if not all of them.

If the pill he has given you for your headache causes nausea, rather than suggesting that you discontinue it, he will gladly prescribe another pill to fix the nausea. When that pill causes an unwanted side effect, he merely prescribes another pill, until by the time you have seen this doctor a few times, you have a fist-full of medications, each one correcting the fault(s) of its predecessor.

Be sure, too, that when you describe your symptoms to your doctor, they are standard symptoms. Doctors have an index file installed in their heads in medical school that contains medical references for all standard diseases and conditions. Do not, under any circumstances, have a symptom or disease that is not listed in this index. If the disease you have does not exist in your doctor’s internal reference index, it simply does not exist. If your disease does not exist, then the doctor assumes one of the following things: your symptoms do not exist, you need psychiatric help to overcome your perceived symptoms, or worse yet, you do not exist.

Also, make sure you limit your symptoms on each visit to one physical problem at a time. While you may have really bad indigestion and a broken arm, if you talk about both of them during the same visit, the doctor will assume you are merely a hypochondriac. This is a little gem of wisdom they have all been taught in medical school – supposedly the patient who lists several physical problems at one time is only looking for attention. So, leave the broken arm for another time, and speak with your doctor only about the indigestion. After all, indigestion is much more conducive to being fixed with a drug than a broken arm.

Lastly, be prepared for whatever hurts when you go into the doctor’s office to hurt much more when you leave. Doctors have a knack for finding where you hurt. They intuitively go right to a painful area and push, probe and punch it until you have a strong desire to kick them in the groin. Many of them also intuitively move out of range of a possible kick just before you launch it, asking “did that hurt?”

While you may be tempted to say, “Yes, you sadistic so-and-so, it hurt,” please confine your answer to a simple ‘yes.’ Doctors always seem surprised and hurt that you do not like it when they have caused you pain. Many will even refuse to believe that your pain exists because in their minds, they are healers, not causative factors in pain.