Can we have a thread on ridiculous things GP's have said?

[Butmummysnotanearlybird]

My contribution was "Oh well baby needs to know what sick tastes like" when they actually had CMPA and reflux. I'm sure there's worse out there 🙃

IMO, anyone trying to shut down this thread should FOTTFSOFATFOSM.
I've already given one example of how NHS gps have failed my family. Here's another:
My DM was seen today by a Community Matron. She did more for DM in one visit than the GP surgery has done in a year.
GP surgery has refused to prescribe nebules, took over a month to issue a script for oramorph (and only did it after I put a request in, attaching a copy of the letter from a respiratory nurse to prove it, but they'd already received a copy).
They only issued a repeat script for a rescue pack after being told to by a respiratory consultant.
They have repeatedly failed to help treat a troublesome cough effectively, which causes DM to choke and retch and become even more breathless (GP kept insisting it was post-nasal drip). They have ignored DM when she requested more help with her anxiety (which is common in respiratory patients).
DM is in her eighties, very frail, has osteoporosis and severe arthritis, besides the emphysema which means she is now on oxygen full time. She was also told at her visit to a respiratory consultant a couple of months ago that is is likely she has between 6 and 12 months left before she goes into end-stage respiratory failure. Essentially, she will suffocate (in effect) when her lungs can no longer exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide sufficiently to keep her alive.
Has this made a difference to her treatment by her GP? Of course not.
Will I keep quiet to assuage other people's feelings. Like fuck I will.

And you obviously think it’s wonderful and deserves nothing but praise with service like that? We do already pay in taxes and I wouldn’t mind having to pay a reasonable amount for a proper service, not the awful one we have now.

Covid has lowered our standards to the point we are accepting not even being able to get through to the drs and just shrugging and saying how over worked they are.

We are a laughing stock. They can literally do any thing to us and still people stand there and say we should be grateful .

Find me someone who isn't over worked , under paid, undervalue , regularly abused by the public. We'd all be fired if we were as unavailable and treated our customers/clients this way.

Vaccines often don't work for immunocompromised people as you need an immune system for the vaccine to mount an immune response and work.

My mum is immunocompromised because of medication she is on. It's recommended to come off the medication for two weeks prior to and two weeks after getting any jabs for people like her so that an immune response is made, but GPs haven't been doing this with her.

When I told her to go to her GP and explain this (it's NHS guidelines, not just me making stuff up), the GP said no. My mum got angry and told him he'd been putting her at risk by sending her to get her flu jab all these years without taking her off her medication, so the flu jabs probably hadn't even been working. The GP.said, well you've never had flu, have you, so they must have worked. 🤦. In the end, I called the GP and pointed out that I have not had the flu jab but I've also never had flu, so his logic is flawed.

My mum eventually had to go private to get advice about this. The private doc took her off the meds, gave her the COVID jab, and tested her antibodies - taking her off it worked and she eventually made an immune response.

Here's my tuppance on this. I've lived abroad and honestly never, ever had the issues abroad with doctors that I've had in the NHS. I don't know if it is cultural or if it is financial, but NHS GPs just don't listen. Their first port of call seems to be to assume it's the most likely thing and send you away to see if it gets better or worse, then keep doing that until it's really obvious that there's something wrong. But abroad, you go with a problem and the doctor says, ok, it's probably this but we need to investigate to exclude all the rarer, more serious problems.

Things doctors in the UK have missed because of this approach:

My inflammatory bowel disease; a family member's brain tumour; a friend's Lyme disease, among others.

Doctors on here, I have a genuine question about this. I know how hard medical professionals work. I'm also in a profession subject to government cuts that is thanked little and slated by the public. This isn't an attack on individuals as doctors, but I am curious to know if there is encouragement from above NOT to send patients immediately for scans etc?

@Prestissimo @Silverplatedchocolatehobnob ^

My life was a living hell. I was going through a period of crippling anxiety and could barely function. Physical anxiety symptoms had me convinced I was going to drop down dead.
GP's response " What do you want me to do? You are going to have to stop making appointments to come to the surgery- all you need to do is to pull yourself together".

I don't know if it's really worth me coming back to this, but I'd like to challenge the narrative that seems to be I was trying to 'shut down' conversation about bad practice and negate people's experiences. I really wasn't.

Do I think GP (or the NHS at large) is functioning well at the moment? No,
I don't. How could I, when I spend my days at work painfully aware of how little we have to offer huge numbers of people. Do I think women have historically been treated badly by the medical profession - yes I do. And as a female GP I hold that with me all the time.

I genuinely do think it's important to tell individual doctors when they've got things wrong, and have answered and supported other GPs in answering complaints (formal and informal) on that basis. As a GP appraiser I review complaints with those doctors and we discuss what the crux of the issue may have been and what learning points there are from any negative incident. These things are done routinely, whatever you may think. I certainly am not arrogant or on a pedestal or in any other way thinking that I'm beyond reproach.

I think it's worth pointing out (although I'll probably be shouted down) that a lot of things are more obvious in hindsight. Many diseases present with vague and developing symptoms, so that it takes time to work out what's going on. Not everyone with bloody diarrhoea has Crohn's disease. Not everyone with a slightly numb arm has MS. As GPs we see huge numbers of patients with vague and non-specific symptoms, and weeding out the serious from the not-so is difficult.

However, doing that in an appropriate way is hugely dependent on a good relationship with the patient. The tales on here of being dismissed or belittled or ignored are awful and it saddens me to hear them. Communication is often a good GPs greatest skill (along with some medical knowledge of course) and it's important that we work on that. I teach medical students as well and I promise we do spend a lot of time talking about communication skills and active listening.

As regards ordering tests and things, we are often limited in what we have access to (sometimes in ridiculous ways). There are local and National guidelines as to what GPs can do, sometimes based on cost alone, sometimes based on who-knows-what. An example - I can no longer send someone directly for an x-ray from the surgery as I used to. I have to refer them, which then takes weeks. So actually acute injuries we do now signpost to A+E or the Urgent Treatment Centre, both of which have access to a simple test that we know the patient needs but cannot request.

When I first commented on this thread I guess I was triggered by the 'ridiculous' in the title. I felt that it was a thread to laugh at doctors who are generally doing their best in often difficult circumstances. I was freshly sad about the doctor whose appraisal documentation talked about leaving the NHS and moving abroad. I'm ground down by the daily dissatisfaction (not all unwarranted) and abuse I and my colleagues face at work. It's demoralising, and conversations like this do add to that. And GPs are leaving. They're retiring, they're choosing different specialties, they're moving abroad. That's not a threat, it's a fact. Someone up-thread mentioned that the system is built in the wrong way and I don't necessarily disagree. But this is the system we have and it's predicated on GPs as 'gatekeepers' and soon there won't be enough of us to do that job and things will collapse even more than they are doing already. The joy I get from my job at the moment is firmly based on what I can do for the individual in front of me, because I really can't control much else.

This is far too long! TLDR: I don't want to shut down debate but I think ridiculing people achieves nothing.

Unfortunately I have had to go the reverse route - get the diagnosis privately and then go to my gp. There are thousands out there who don’t have this option. The cost of diagnostics is (relatively) cheap and probably would pay for itself rapidly, but there seems to be little will to improve the situation.

do we are going to continue to have under-informed GPS and frustrated patients.

@BattenbergdowntheHatches yes you're right - what we do is manage uncertainty. Sometimes well and sometimes not so well.

I disagree with you that instant access to all tests is the answer - it's not always good to have all the tests all the time, and some tests can be positively harmful (not just obvious things like x-rays, but the risk of picking up incidental findings that are non-consequential but can cause significant anxiety and sometimes lead to potentially harmful treatment - cf the current debate about whether we're doing more harm than good with modern ultra-sensitive mammograms or whether we should be screening for prostate cancer with PSA tests).

Not doing tests requires good communication, though, and trust between patient and doctor, and appropriate follow-up. However, when we do need a test it would be helpful to be able to access it, and quickly. I can do some things easily in the surgery, but 6-8 weeks+ for x-rays or ultrasound scans at the moment isn't really good enough, is it?

Also of course what we need is prompt access to specialist advice and input - and nearly all secondary care waits around us are 12 months+. I can do tests to investigate inflammatory bowel disease but urgent appointments with a gastroenterologist are 11months away. I could weep. And actually do sometimes. I can't justify it to my patients, and often I have nothing more to offer them.

I'm particularly grateful that I and my family are not in need of healthcare currently. But it's not much fun being a GP at the moment either

This. 100% this. I have similar experiences.

Absolutely agree with the post above.

No I bloody won't. And it wouldn't do me much good anyway as I am in Scotland. Some GPs behave appallingly and patients have a right to say so. I am fed up to the back teeth with GPs getting away with minimal work and a complete lack of caring (caveat; I am sure there are good GPs out there). The practice I am with has two GPs who work 4 days a week, the others do 2 days and the senior partner does one. This information is freely available on their website. These people held a birthday party at the surgery during the strictest part of lockdown leaving the whole place under quarantine for a fortnight. The only saving grace is the two APNs who have been seeing patients throughout the pandemic. It is still almost impossible to see a doctor, not because they are busy but because they just aren't there.
On a personal level they failed to diagnose a hernia for me which then strangulated and damn near killed me.
The catbum faced denial that any GP could ever be anything other than wonderful, the idea that nobody has a right to complain about anything is utterly vomit provoking. Just don't. Got a great GP who works hard and listens to you? Good, praise them to the skies, they deserve it. I am truly glad there are some. But don't assume that we are all that lucky.

“GP's are well-paid and yet they cannot be recruited.’’

this is the thing isn’t it?

@prestissimo’s reflections are useful, especially about the managing uncertainty.
forme, I don’t think the way the doctors union/representative body talks to them or to us is helpful or right. They don’t seem to be able to advocate for themselves in a way that commands respect or which has any authenticity. Take the strike a few years ago. The government basically “rebranded” Saturdays as weekdays resulting in effective loss of pay for the lower paid juniors. But I only found that out here. The drs campaigners themselves talked nonsense about “all in this together” which is a sure fire way to alienate anyone without a final salary pension scheme.

we dont seem to know as a society how to handle the dr/patient relationship any more.

Btw my son has just been misdiagnosed and nearly died as a result. When I tell the story with hindsight it all seems obvious. But it wasn’t at the time.

It’s not GP-bashing, and teacher threads are not teacher-bashing either. Why would someone start a thread just to be mean about a profession?

the problem is that people really do have bad experiences and it helps to share them. It might help someone realise when they’ve been fobbed off and could actually get help with a second opinion. It can also help to hear other people’s stories when you feel like you’re going mad because no one will listen.

Most of the GPs at my surgery are fantastic and one, now retired, got me through some terrible trauma and subsequent MH hell, I will be forever grateful to her. But there is one bad one. I took my baby to him with a serious ear infection and he wouldn’t even examine her, saying “all babies get ear infections, it will sort itself out you don’t need antibiotics, stop worrying.” Complete with patronising eye roll. Took her to a&e that night as it was so swollen and she was in so much pain. Emergency admission and surgery. They had to blue-light a specialist surgeon from another part of the country.

He saw a worried mum with a baby and so immediately wrote the situation off as silly woman fussing over nothing. That’s a phenomenon that many women experience from GPs and it;s important to share and understand it.

Same with teachers. There are some nasty bullying teachers out there and complaints are often met with an insinuation that you’re overprotective or your child is lying because the teacher is “lovely and would never do that” - even when you have multiple reports from different families. Hearing that other people get what you mean is invaluable, it helps you understand that you’re being gaslighted and are not going mad.

That obviously doesn’t means it’s all gps/teachers/whatever. Good ones should welcome discussion of these problems and take the issues on board as they’re in a position to improve things.

Parents used to take me to the doctors because I'd complain of headaches, randomly vomit at night (no fever / obvious illness) and because I'd fall over all the time.

Every GP said it was my eye condition.

15 years later, I was at the neurologists because I was complaining of chronic neck / back pain. I had an MRI scan done. Neurologist asks my mum if she knew that as a child I had epilepsy. That would explain the vomiting at night. I did get tested at 11 and was told I didn't have it. (only because I'd fallen out of bed and injured my head)

I've said it before and I'll say it again. We also have a home in France. Primary care is so much better there. Those one deals with are also so much more polite. Money changes hands.

The principle problem in the UK is that we are supposed to be grateful and doff our caps to the GP who provides free care. It isn't free, it's free at the point of delivery. We pay very high levels of tax AND for private healthcare to supplement the NHS. My GP surgery is unbelievably unhelpful and the admin errors and time it takes to contact them is ridiculous although most of the Dr's are quite good.

Overall it is the self importance and subordination of the patient that sticks in my craw. Only in the UK's NHS does a Dr address the patient by their first name whilst introducing themselves as Dr. It is just so rude.

At my last GP appointment the Dr came out said hello Roses and introduced himself as Dr Bloggs. I politely asked why he assumed he may use my first name whilst expecting me to address him with a title. Evidently he had forgotten my surname as he walked down the corridor. I said "well I assume you haven't forgotten your first name is David if you wish to use mine". He didn't like it one little bit but neither do I like being addressed as the GP's subordinate. It's either Roses/David or Mrs Hellebores/Dr Bloggs. Are basic good manners not taught at medical school or is it just arrogance?

My solicitor and accountant don't treat me as a subordinate stakeholder - they treat me as an equal. If they didn't they know my business and money would go elsewhere.

I am utterly sick of hearing excuses for the NHS. It is not good enough. Yes Dr's work hard. So do accountants, lawyers, academics, bin men, pilots, retail staff, etc. None of them have the same job security and all of them would be hauled over the coals if they were rude to a customer let alone if they were negligent.

It's funny as I hate doctors calling me Mrs X. I'd far rather they used my first name. But my grandma hated it, she saw it as disrespectful.

In fairness, some of the consultants I've seen recently have told me to call them by their first name.

@lop32 I'd rather they used my first name too, everyone else does. However everyone else introduces themselves with theirs and I will not address another human as my superior and neither should a doctor assume they are.

GPs always call me Mrs X, when I’m a Miss. It annoys me as it’s presumptuous and if they can’t get that simple thing right then I do wonder…

Those saying to give GPs a break - no. GPs are single handedly the most incompetent and overpaid professionals in the UK. Specialists in nothing but seemingly jack of no trade either.

I have X ailment - "One second whilst I Google your symptoms and come up with a plan that involves paracetamol". GPs are not surgeons - they do not exist in a high pressure environment and yet still get many decisions wrong on a daily basis. They supposedly have no time for each patient but find time to work privately alongside their NHS work for the financial incentives - this should be illegal. knowledge of evolving medicine is poor - this is their fault as they are expected to spend time improving their knowledge to provide more upto date care for patients but spent the time earning £50 p/h providing private appointments.

Patients on the other hand may say stupid things occasionally but even those who don't are ignored by their GPs and treated like idiots when they probably have more knowledge of the illness causing their ailments than a GP does. They also aren't the ones being paid to do this job.

When l was 14/15 and having horrendously heavy periods (I was anaemic, taking prescription iron tablets, and used to faint at the drop of a hat, once causing me to pass out and fall down a full flight of stairs at school) a male doctor told me 'not to worry about it, it'll right itself when you have a baby...'