While your doctor has undergone years of training and practice, she or he is ultimately still human and may come with their own set of biases that can impact how they treat patients. To combat these biases and really the most out of your interactions with your doctor, you should provide her or him with plenty of information about your life and ask plenty of questions when things aren’t clear. To better understand how you should approach conversations with your doctor, we spoke to Dr. Dana Chase, gynecologic oncologist at Arizona Oncology.
Making sure your doctor understands you
According to Dr. Chase, physicians, like many of us, can be a bit biased when seeing patients. Dr. Chase makes clear that these biases are rarely sinister, but rather unconscious and more subtle. She says, “We have certain beliefs that we don’t know about. We might look, for example, at an older woman, and just by the way she looks we might make certain assumptions, and we might not even know that we’re making these assumptions.”
Read MoreMaking sure you understand your doctor
Clearing up misconceptions is important, but so is understanding what your doctor is telling you, says Dr. Chase. In order to do so, she advises women to speak up and ask questions when they don’t understand something. “It’s never a bad thing to ask for something to be repeated, or to ask the doctors to explain it in different terms.” So next time you go to your physician, we think you should feel empowered to speak up, both so she or he understand you and you understand them.
Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.
