Medical Questionnaires -- a Personal Affront?
Last week I had to fill out a medical questionnaire for a new doctor. I swear, most of those questionnaires are designed to make me crazy. Am I the only one who reacts badly to the questions? Oh, I'm not talking about questions about my health history or personal thing. I'm talking about the basic info gathering that they usually put at the top!
My first issue is marital status. Now, you can probably predict that I'd have a problem with that because I'm a lesbian. At many offices, even today, the only options are single, married, divorced, and widowed. It's a complete heterosexual continuum (at least, as declared by the federal government) where there is no acknowledgment for other relationships. That alone would make me annoyed.
But it makes me crazy from heterosexual point of view, too, because the definitions don't make sense. Personally, if I get a divorce (and I have been divorced) I become single again. My forehead is not stamped with a capital D for the rest of my days, until I remarry. This is not 1945. And what about widowed? Someone's spouse dies and they have to forever check the "widowed" box to remind them of their loss? That's crazy. How archaic is this?
But that's not the part that makes me the most frustrated. It's educational level. You know, where you have to check things like high school graduate, associate degree, bachelor's degree, doctorate, etc. (Thank goodness not all doctors include this question.)
Education questions irritate me because I know the goal is to make assumptions about the patient's intellectual capacity. You know, so that the doctor can adjust the conversation to the right level. I will concede that, for the most part, this may work effectively. However, some of us are extraordinarily self-educated and cannot be properly assessed using this method.
Who cares, right? Well, I certainly didn't, until I realized that I wasn't getting the full story if I checked the wrong box. Most doctors could figure out my level of understanding after just a short conversation with me. But some just look at the boxes. Let's just say, I'm not the kind of person you want to withhold information from or talk down to, and once that starts happening, it's not good for anyone. (Close friends who read this are probably chuckling to themselves.)
Last year I met with an orthopedic surgeon who decided to write me off intellectually because I did not have a degree. He felt I couldn't understand any of the issues of my condition and he should make decisions for me. Given that our conversation started off with him grilling me about just what my answer of "some college" meant for educational level, I can be pretty sure it related to that. (Some college, by the way, means some college. Duh!) In this case, I never saw the surgeon again, but what about those times where you don't know what's really going on?
A few friends have said I should just check Ph.D and leave it at that. Which, by the way, is a great way to get off jury duty. Seriously, it's true. It turns out that on most juries, attorneys don't want people with high degrees because they believe they will have too much influence over the other jurors. That has little to do with medical questionnaires but it does go to show that we do a lot of judging in this world, all based on scraps of facts that don't necessarily add up to any truth. It's something to think about.
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