What to Do When Your Doctor Doesn't Take You Seriously

"Thank you for letting me know where the clinic stands."

That is the entire sentence I managed. I had been sitting in that room for the better part of an hour, first with the nurse who ran through medication options, then with the specialist who came in after her, and what he had come to tell me was that I needed to decide. He framed it as fairness. There has to come a point, he said, where you choose. Either you go on the medication or you do not.

And then the part I did not see coming. If I was going to keep declining treatment, they would have to look again at whether they would keep sending me for MRIs at all. Because if I was not going to act on the results, what exactly were we scanning for.

I said thank you. I said thank you for giving me that information. I picked up my bag and I walked out through the waiting room, past the other women sitting there with their coats in their laps, and I got into my car.

And then I broke.

I cried in that parking lot the way you cry when something has been building for years. And when I was finished crying I was angry, properly angry, in a way I could feel in my hands. So I did the only thing I know how to do with that feeling. I opened my notes and I wrote down exactly what had been said, and exactly how it landed, and that I was going to find a different clinic.

That complaint is written. It has not been sent yet. It will be.

What being dismissed actually does
Here is the part that is difficult to explain to someone who has never sat in that chair.

The lost time is bad. The missed diagnosis is worse. But the thing that does the deepest damage is what it teaches you about yourself. After enough appointments like that, you stop needing anyone else to dismiss you. You do it at home, in advance, before you have even picked up the phone to book. You feel something wrong and you hear a voice that sounds like yours saying it is probably nothing, do not make a fuss, do not be that woman.

That is the injury. Not the appointment. The way the appointment follows you home and starts speaking in your voice.

It is not you, and here is the evidence
For years I assumed I was the problem. Too disorganised, too emotional, too vague, too much.

Then I read the research and something in my chest let go.

One study out of the Mayo Clinic recorded real consultations and looked at how they actually begin. In only about a third of visits did the clinician invite the patient to say why they were there at all. And when they did invite it, patients were interrupted roughly seven times out of ten, at a median of eleven seconds in.

Eleven seconds.

The same research found that patients who were left alone to finish took about six seconds to say their piece. Six seconds. That is what was too long to wait.

And it gets worse if you are seeing a specialist rather than a family doctor. Specialists were considerably less likely to ask an opening question at all, and quicker to interrupt when they did.

So if you have ever walked out of an appointment feeling like you never got to the thing you came to say, you are not imagining that. You are describing the documented default.

How I know within ten minutes
People ask me how I can tell whether a doctor is going to be a yes or a no. The honest answer is that I feel it, and I have learned to trust that feeling instead of talking myself out of it.

But when I slow it down, here is what I am actually reading.

They interrupt. They rush. They are answering before I have finished the sentence. They reach for a prescription pad before I have told them what is happening, which means they decided what this was somewhere in the first thirty seconds. They talk over the top of me and then summarise what I said incorrectly.

Honestly, most of the time you do not even get ten minutes. You get about two, and two is enough.

If you feel yourself shrinking in that room, getting quieter, apologising, editing yourself down to be less annoying, pay attention. That is not your personality. That is information about them.

What I do before I go
I stopped walking into appointments as a question and started walking in with a proposal. That is the whole shift, and everything below is how I do it.

I keep a record. It lives in a journal and it is not fancy. Date, time, what I ate, how I slept, how I felt, what my body did. Physical symptoms and mood both, because they move together and doctors rarely ask about the second one. Over months it stops being a diary and becomes evidence. Patterns show up that I could never have recalled from memory in a rushed appointment.

I do the research first. Before I go, I read. Not so I can diagnose myself, but so I know what questions are worth asking and what tests exist. If a name for what I suspect comes up, I bring it and I say I would like to rule this in or out.

I decide what I need before I walk in. Not what I hope they might offer. What I am asking for. Bloodwork for this. A referral to that. This scan. I write it down so that when I am nervous and being rushed, I do not have to think, I only have to read.

I keep the original and hand over a copy. My records are mine. I have given a copy over exactly once, months of symptom logs to my family doctor for my file, and that was useful. But I do not surrender the only version of my own history to anyone. Copy goes to them. Original comes home with me.

What I say in the room
It is simpler than people expect. Four moves, in order.

This is what I am feeling. This is what has been happening and for how long. This is what I have tracked, and here is the pattern. And this is what I would like to do about it.

That last one is the piece most of us leave out. We describe and then wait to be rescued. Naming what you want changes the entire shape of the conversation, because now they are responding to a proposal rather than deciding what to do with you.

My most recent appointment was the most prepared I have ever been, and it was the easiest one I have had in fifteen years. Not because the doctor was different. Because I was.

The one-push rule

I ask. If they say no, I push back once. Clearly, calmly, with my reason. If the answer is still no, I stop, and I go elsewhere.

I am not in the business of changing a doctor’s mind. Someone who is set in their thinking is not going to be argued out of it by me in a twelve minute appointment, and the attempt costs me something every time. I would rather not walk out of another office in tears, or spend the drive home wondering whether I am the unreasonable one.

So when I get a second no, I do not escalate. I leave, and I find somebody who will. Walk-in clinic. Different doctor. Across the city if I have to, and I have. I have waited hours to be seen by someone new rather than spend one more appointment persuading someone who had already decided.

That is my preference, not a prescription. Some women have more fight in them for that particular battle, and if that is you, good. But if you have been telling yourself that leaving means giving up, I want to offer you the other reading. Leaving is a strategy. And it can often be a faster route to the answer.

Finding a doctor who says yes
There is no elegant method here and I will not pretend otherwise.

When I got properly sick, I started looking for someone new. I wanted a woman, and I wanted someone accepting patients, and beyond that it was luck. She came up. I went. Several of my family members ended up with her too.

What I will say is that it took time, and it took me being consistent. She pushed back on me more than once. She told me she did not think I needed something, and I said I understand, and I need you to write it anyway. I did that enough times that she came to understand who she was dealing with, and the relationship settled into something that works.

Finding her took effort I should not have had to spend. That is true and it makes me angry on your behalf. But I would rather tell you what it actually took than sell you a gentler version that leaves you unprepared.

The night before
This is the part almost nobody writes about, so I want to.

The night before a hard appointment used to wreck me. Anxiety in my whole body. No sleep. And because stress and lost sleep are two of the reliable triggers for my MS, I would frequently walk into the appointment already flaring, which is a particularly cruel arrangement. Stressed about being dismissed, made more unwell by the stress, then dismissed while unwell.

Underneath it was one specific fear, and I suspect you know it. That I was being difficult. That I was too much. That if I pushed, they would decide I was a problem patient and I would lose access to the little help I had.

That fear was not irrational. It is the same fear that keeps most women from ever trying any of this.

What I do now is smaller than you would think. I meditate. I read. I go for a walk. I make sure I have eaten properly and slept as well as I am able. And I talk to myself, in the car, the way I would talk to a friend, and what I say is: you know your body better than anyone in that building.

That last part took years. It used to be a frantic pep talk to get myself through the door. Now it is closer to a settled fact.

The appointments do not frighten me the way they used to. I know I am going to speak plainly and from what I actually feel, and I know there is nothing a doctor can say that will move me off the path I know I need to be on. That is not confidence I was born with. It is practice.

What I want you to take from this
You are allowed to prepare. You are allowed to write it down. You are allowed to ask for a specific test and to ask again when the answer does not sit right.

You are allowed to want a second opinion. You are allowed to change doctors. You are allowed to leave a clinic that makes you feel small.

Advocating for yourself is not being difficult and it is not being a bad patient. It is being responsible for the one body you have, and nobody on this earth is ever going to care about it the way you do.

You don’t have to figure this out alone
If you read all of that and felt tired, I understand. It is a lot to carry, and it is work you should not have to do.

But you do not have to build it from scratch, and you do not have to do it by yourself.

Wherever you are in this, whether your next appointment is on Tuesday or you have been avoiding booking one for months, there is something here for you. Take what helps and leave the rest.

Come sit with us. The TRAC community is where women trade what actually worked, which is worth more than any article. The membership is free. → Join us

Or work with me one on one. If you have an appointment coming and you want someone to help you prepare for it properly, we can do that together. → Book a call

You know your body better than anyone in that building.

Go in like it.

With you,

Jennifer