Thread by @VABVOX

This thread📌is one of the most egregiously out of touch I've ever read from someone purporting to be a doctor. It's infuriatingly smug and anti-patient. In the real world, NO ONE GETS TO CHOOSE THEIR HOSPITAL. But we do, as patients, get to say no to care that is substandard.
1/

https://twitter.com/michaelyehmd/status/1379498018035015680

Claiming that "patient outcomes," matter as a global quotient, rather than as individuals' humanity, belies the reality many patients experience at the hands of doctors-in-training who are often told NOT to listen to patients by smug anti-patient medicalists like Dr. Yeh.
2/

Demanding patients "STFU & do as you're told," which is Dr. Yeh's overarching message here, subverts the very concept he is claiming to promote: Teaching humans to be doctors. There is a centuries-long history of women, POC and the poor being unheard by medicine and science.
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There is no one-size-fits-all medicine. Dr. Yeh is speaking about training robots--not caring for patients. When your attitude is that patients should be quiet and undemanding, you are already missing the function of medicine, which MUST be patient-centered, patient-attuned.
4/

5yrs ago, I was forced to use my journalistic skills to call the heads of hospital to my bedside to circumvent poor treatment for myself and other less vocal patients on my floor to advocate against dismissive doctoring of me & poor POC in a teaching hospital. It was scary af.
5/

I had to lie in a bed after having just been paralyzed, and demand better treatment for myself and nine other patients whose treatment I could hear via an open patient intercom system. We were all put in danger by adherence to Dr. Yeh's concept of trainee system over humanity.
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There are magnificent doctors out there. My life has been saved more than once by conscientious PATIENT-CENTERED doctoring. But proclamations like the ones in Dr. Yeh's thread are dangerous malfeasance. The training comes from patients--from listening to what THEY tell YOU.
7/

Failure to center the patient as an individual is bad science. Particularly for women and POC who are routinely dismissed by doctors and who historically are sent away from ERs as drug-seeking or hypochondriacal, only to die within 24hrs of something treatable in a white man.
8/

So, Dr. Yeh and any others NOT listening to patients: Stop. Stop pulling out manuals and start laying on hands. Recognize a female, Black or brown patient with have wildly divergent symptomatology compared to a white male. Listen first, talk last. Teach THAT. And practice it.
9/

No one wants to read a whole thread on talking back to doctors because we're acculturated to be silent & not say no even when we know we're right. But you have to save your own lives. So you have to speak up and out. Go into hospital knowing this and you'll come out alive.
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