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 🙃

How do you even know how many holidays your GP takes or how many hours they work a week?!

It's a village where everyone knows everyone! And they are open about it.

You have a kidney infection - it was sepsis.
Have you Googled it?
You're not depressed and we can’t help you - after 2 very close bereavements, homelessness, serious illness.
We’re very cross that you haven’t been in for a smear test - I don’t have a cervix

My own GP is great

Out of hours GP
"Your bloods are fine so you can't have neutropenia" (after explaining I injected GCSF so my neutrophils would be normal)
"What causes that?" When I said it was autoimmune

I had post natal depression and was overly anxious about my newborn baby and that’s why I took him to a&e 4 times in a week. His temp was high because I was putting too many layers on him.

he had meningitis.

But we can’t ‘pull you up’ if you get things wrong, can we? Not every time.

Friends have mine have complained and got nowhere. And threads like this, although maybe a bit spiteful, do highlight a serious problem: we have huge issues in the quality of our primary healthcare in this country. And no, it’s not just about funding or recruitment, it’s about the quality of training and the attitude of many health professionals to their patients.

There is only one decent GP in my practice - two at a push. The others are either rude, don’t listen to the problem, have misdiagnosed things or, frankly, have really poor knowledge. And threads like this show these aren’t isolated problems. It’s widespread.

GPs might be overworked and stressed and obviously everyone makes mistakes, but this is people’s lives we’re talking about, not breaking the photocopier.

Here is a good news one
Had an infection, 7 day course of antibiotic, which normally works.
Filled in eConsult Monday lunchtime. Answer within 2 hrs, appt 4.45 that afternoon.
I go, Doc emails a new antibiotic, Collected 5.20pm,
Yesterday I start to feel better.
Today WED 0830hrs Doc calls me, How are you feeling? Is there any improvement? Still have the temperature?
I assure him I am on the mend and feeling quite well. He says call again if I don't continue to improve.
I thank him.
They are not machine crammed, they is all different

As a teen I asked my doctor what to do for the awful fever I had. He told me I should go home and take off all my clothes and lay naked by the window, while he was stroking my leg.

When I had appendicitis I was told nothing was wrong and to go home and have a light diet. So I crawled into a cab and went home, I needed emergency surgery the next day.

Then it's all the little things like - Not offering pain relief during procedures.
Lying about chance of pain during procedures.
Doctors lying and telling me things like my referral was from a nurse, not another doctor.
Or male GPs telling me I have no choice of a female doctor for intimate examinations and to just take my clothes off.

I've had mostly very good experiences with our GP practice, but not always ...

I remember going to see a doctor because I was feeling very depressed. I had lost my sister about a year before. When I started to explain how I was feeling, he exclaimed 'What's a lovely young girl like you got to be depressed about?' No offer of medication, just a vague mention of the practice CPN if things got 'any worse'. And a story about a 'girl' (I was 29 and a 'girl' also apparently🙄) who had been sitting in his surgery one month and was dead from ovarian cancer the next. Like I should be grateful I wasn't dying. I was absolutely devastated and felt like a complete fraud. Thankfully I braced myself and went to see his colleague a few months later and she was utterly fantastic. So, yes, there's good and bad and they are human and all that, but sending away a bereaved, depressed woman with a wave of the hand is disgraceful. He knew my sister had died because he mentioned her - except he called her by MY name. Silly old fart. I was too bloody depressed to stand up for myself.

the priests always gave their critics of course. But what they do in response is to suggest that it is morally wrong to criticise them - and silly people agree. Which is exactly what is happening here. It also enables a health service which produces scandal after scandal to escape any real examination of its culture.

It's a village where everyone knows everyone! And they are open about it.

Open as in they actually tell you personally 'yes, I'm off to the Maldives again and I've bought a 2nd Audi from my 24 hour a week income because this GP lark is such an easy gig' or open as in Ethel in the corner shop has said 'I think Dr Jones has gone away because I couldn't get in to see her again'?.

Unless you personally know each of those GPs you cannot possibly know the ins and outs of their daily lives. Perhaps they have their own medical needs which means reduced hours, maybe they have family abroad and use all their leave to see them. There's a plethora of reasons why someone might appear to have numerous absences and work part time. It's not a crime to own a nice car either, I know people who are not GPs who have them.

Agreed.

I would never expect my GP to know everything about every ailment. But I would expect them to make the necessary investigations and referrals, and if it’s something unusual to work with me to get to the bottom of it.

I would also expect them to have good general knowledge of:

Menopause
Common skin complaints
Cysts, fibroids etc
Migraine
Postnatal and babies’ health

Sadly, this is often lacking.

My mum’s GP has been an absolute lifesaver, the week she had to phone me to tell me my mum had very likely early onset dementia she phoned me for a whole hour, answering questions and calming me down . Told me in ten years time I’ll be introducing her to my own children and that life just now will all be a memory .

My GP before during my teens and twenties was/is one of the most wonderful people I know, I still send her a Mother’s Day card every year - she was/is like a second mum to me .

I would be completely lost without having a GP, because of life circumstances I’ve unfortunately seen one every four weeks since I turned sixteen, I feel exceptionally safe in that environment . They’re worth their weight in gold .

Told repeatedly for the first year of my baby's life by my doctor, paediatrician and health visitor that there was nothing wrong with her and I was just an over anxious first time older parent . Turns out she had a genetic condition and I was unfortunately right. She can't walk, talk, eat, use her hands, nothing

Totally agree!
What about the times when GPs have got it right, have helped, supported, worked overtime, listened carefully, gone above and beyond? A thread about that, focusing on positivity for once would be more appropriate.

Nothing to stop you starting a positive thread I guess - better than trying to close down what others want to discuss

What about the times when GPs have got it right, have helped, supported, worked overtime, listened carefully, gone above and beyond? A thread about that, focusing on positivity for once would be more appropriate.

Appropriate for who? I'd love to be able contribute to a thread like that. Unfortunately my experience with GPs has never been any of those things.
It's been rushed, unkind, rude, misogynistic, lecherous, deceptive and even dangerous at times.

I think there's definitely a huge problem with many GPs thinking parents (particularly mothers) are over anxious. My sister could barely make it up the stairs when she was small. She wheezed like an old steam train. She was extremely skinny, had blue lips in winter and you could see every vein under her skin. My mum was sent away multiple times feeling like she was wasting the GP's time. He once said 'who wants a fat child?'. It was a wonderful school nurse who pushed to have her referred to the hospital where it was discovered she had a genetic illness. It's a rare condition and a GP might only ever come across it a couple of times, if ever, in their career, but she was very obviously very sick and my mum shouldn't have been ignored.

Why is women talking about their experiences of poor healthcare inappropriate? It's hardly an undocumented issue that healthcare professionals - including GPs - are often dismissive of women's pain and other symptoms.

I've encountered this myself - I have endometriosis, and it took me between a year and two years of actively making GP appointments and agitating for something to be done for me to actually get a GP to take my symptoms seriously and refer me to a consultant. In that time, I had a GP tell me that "some women just have pelvic pain", which felt dismissive when I was very distressed and looking for answers. I also had multiple other GPs struggle to look beyond giving me STI tests/referring me to a GUM clinic - because, I can only assume, I was a young woman.

These are not horrendous experiences, just disquieting, and I can understand why GPs take an approach of watchful waiting, rather than referring every person on to hospital, but it is very difficult to go back again and again to a GP and be dismissed when your health is at stake.

Yes, some people abuse GPs - but the vast majority of people don't - and I don't see why we should be forbidden from talking about poor or dismissive care due to this.

Yes I've discovered you can't win.

You dare to go in with an idea of what might be wrong and its as if they disagree on purpose . Look at you like you just bit the head off their puppy and you get tarred as over anxious or overly cautious etc

Go in and appear clueless and you will be taken advantage off. Leave none the wiser, probably with a generic reasonably cheap /harmless " solution" which you can buy OTC so feel extra guilty fir " wasting their time" which if course doesn't help/work but you are suitably put off going back.

You have to tread that very fine line in the.middle. appear to not know quite enough so it can be entirely their idea but also we'll enough equipped that you can ask the right questions/say the right thing to plant the seeds , and don't walk out no better off than you were before, fobbed off with a non.diagnosis .

That's my experience anyway

I’ve had some great GP’s and some who were dreadful. I can appreciate they’ve been doing a very demanding role in an underfunded NHS. But as others say if we go back to a time where we can’t call out those who are bullying, rude, sarcastic, incompetent then we do the next patient who’s badly affected a huge disservice.

One of my old GPs who is still working :( would often try to derail the consultation in order to make rude or stupid remarks or ask probing unrelated questions. I probably went to the GP once a year, if that, so I wasn’t exactly a time waster. On one occasion he asked me to explain my physical symptoms, he interrupted me and asked when I was getting married?! He then went on to ask why I was frightened of my local area and was that the cause of my anxiety! I’d never discussed anything about my private life and gone to the docs for an infection. On previous occasions he’d done similar and talked about his work experiences at an old psychiatric hospital close to where I used to live. And asked if I’d ever been there? 🙄 NOPE. Gawd knows what my GP notes looked like after visiting this doctor.

Oh boo hoo! How dare anyone upset the poor, hard-done-by, hardworking GPs. Never mind that they are paid handsomely and most seem to work part time.
Understandably people are annoyed at bloody stupid things that have been said to them and should be allowed to say it.

@AssignedSlytherinAtBirth I gave
the hoarding anecdote and I assure you that he was not probing to find out ‘what hoarding looked like in this case’, he genuinely didn’t know what it was. When I explained it to him, he looked at me disbelievingly like such a thing could not ever be possible. It’s a common symptom of dementia. He was pretty damn dismissive.

When I went to the gp for severe insomnia and told to drink whisky or brandy before bed.

When I visited for ongoing chest pains after covid, was tutted at and eye rolled and told "obviously it's not your heart" before I'd explained the symptoms.

Told I was probably menopausal in my late thirties (I wasn't) when I visited about heavy periods. Then asked about my Mother's history. I explained I didn't know as she didn't bring me up as she was severely mentally ill and institutionalised for all of my childhood and teens, I then got a lecture on how as an only child, I should make more effort to be closer to her!!

You silly woman you must be mistake..misread the situation...

Not heard that befire

And no, I don’t think the medically trained should be held up as sacrosanct. No other highly trained and paid professionals are, I am one (other profession) myself. They should be subject to continuing professional development and to meet certain reasonable standards like anyone else.