Thoughts
I’ve Explained My Condition More Than My Doctors Have
· Updated · Madeleine Nicholas
Being an informed patient should mean being heard and included in your care, not carrying the responsibility of educating the professionals treating you.
Somewhere along the way, “informed patient” became “patient does the specialist’s homework.” Those are not the same thing.
Patients deserve collaborative care, where lived experience is respected without expecting them to shoulder the work of the healthcare system.
💚 Have you ever felt like you had to teach your healthcare provider just to receive appropriate care?
I’ve lost count of how many appointments I’ve walked into and ended up teaching the person meant to be treating me. Explaining my own condition, correcting an assumption, printing out research because nobody had time to look it up themselves.
Patients with less common conditions are quietly expected to do homework the system hasn’t done. Advocate, explain, educate, on top of managing whatever brought you there in the first place. It gets called empowerment. Half the time it’s just unpaid labour with a nicer name.
Explaining my own experience doesn’t bother me. It becoming the entire appointment does, while the actual care gets squeezed into whatever ten minutes are left. “Informed patient” somehow turned into “patient does the specialist’s homework for them,” and those were never meant to be the same thing.
I earned everything I know about my own body the hard way. It shouldn’t have to stand in for someone else doing their job.
Have you ever left an appointment feeling like you did more explaining than the person treating you did?
If you’re tired of carrying the education load on your own, that’s exactly what the Self Advocacy Collection is built to change, coming soon. Link in bio, lighteningup.com.au.
Madeleine x