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So often doctors go over your problems without care. Sometimes you describes 4 hard and 1 secondary symptoms you endured for a few months (to avoid being a trigger-happy hypocondriac). They'll only hear the harmless one and talk about it as if that was your main reason behind the visit. Pretty odd.



Expertise doesn't equal immunity from the streetlight effect.


Maybe. There's also statistical fatigue. After hearing 100s of people complain about similar stuff you jump to conclusion. Or it may be disdain too.


This resonates with me so much .. I used to think I was helping doctors by giving them as much detail as possible. It'd list all my symptoms, even minor ones, thinking that it's giving them the complete set of information to work from, that the more data I gave them about what's going on, the better their diagnosis would be, the better they'd be able to help me.

In reality every time I did this they universally started to look at me odd, as if I was making things up, or overly anxious, or a hypochondriac, etc. When you list minor symptoms they interpret it as "this guy is complaining about nothing issues" and they start to write you off.

It's infuriating when you give them all the symptoms, both major and minor, and they respond afterwards by just latching onto the minor issues and waving them away and telling me not to worry about it.

There's just such a barrier to communication in such circumstances.


Drunk man searching for keys under street light




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