Symptoms: nervous tremble in voice, loss of confidence, forgetting your name.
Causes: getting talked down to by the doctors while your mom tries, and fails, to explain your illness for you.
Treatments: doctors need to actually listen to all their patients.
I like to call this condition doctor brain. A kid ends up in the presence of a doctor and suddenly forgets everything they’ve ever known. But there’s a reason for it. The way that many doctors interact with minors has led to a power imbalance, making kids and teens alike fear that yearly checkup.
“How old are you?” Well, I know that one – I think. Cue the look towards mom. She’ll answer better. “How have you been feeling recently?” That’s a hard one, what if I jumble my words? Better to let mom handle it.
At my pediatrician’s office, and most doctor’s offices, conversations take place between the doctor, the patient (kid), and the parent. Intentionally or not, many doctors tend to favor the perspective of the parents over the patient themselves. That makes sense in the case of the six-month old who can’t speak up for themselves, but loses validity quickly after toddlerhood.
Most parents don’t intend to speak ‘for’ their kids, but that’s what it becomes. And, sorry to say, no matter how much of a mama’s boy you are, your mom does not share your symptoms. The miscommunication between a minor’s firsthand account and the parent’s interpretation can lead to misdiagnosis and undue pain.
But this isn’t just a problem at that once a year appointment for many.
A National Library of Medicine study from 2019 found that out of 1,253 children ages 5-9, 20 percent had at least one chronic illness.
Chronic illness in minors can keep them at the doctor’s office or hospital multiple times a month. And when it goes misdiagnosed, or isn’t looked into enough, that can be dangerous.
According to a National Health Statistics Report, between 2017 and 2019, 107.3 million emergency department visits were made annually by adults, with almost sixty percent of those coming from adults with at least one chronic condition.
By listening to kids the first time, we might have a chance to decrease that 107.3 million through education and treatment.
Lots of teens can’t hop in the car and drive to the hospital. Lots of Creek students can’t spend precious class time going to the nurse’s office. And because of this, lots of students, like me, are left standing behind their parents at the doctor’s, scared to bring up how they actually feel.
But it’s not just parents overstepping that’s the issue. In my experience, many doctors don’t take minors’ accounts at face value. Sure, kids lie to get out of school. Sure, kids embellish to get attention. And sure, some kids still think “A Bad Case of the Stripes” was a true story. But newsflash, doctors – adults aren’t much different.
I have a good relationship with my pediatrician, yet I’m still scared to start going to appointments on my own. Without my mom there, will my word be taken at face value, or will I be met with “let’s wait and see?”
But this larger problem with doctor-patient interactions stems far beyond just kids. There’s a dark history of medical mistreatment of people of color in America, and many are still affected by it. A 2022 Pew Research Center study found that 55 percent of Black Americans have had bad experiences too, like having to speak up to receive proper care or not being taken seriously.
Though I’ve seen all 21 (and counting) seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, I could never be a doctor. All I’m suggesting is that we pay just as much attention to the stressed-out kid as we do to their hovering parent, that doctors offer the same respect and level of care to all patients, regardless of things like age or race.
I was in and out of doctors’ offices my junior year, and it felt like no matter how much I pushed, no one could help. Sure, it can be frustrating to repeat yourself, or easier to let your parents speak for you, but the more that we prove we can advocate effectively at the doctors, the more credit we’ll be given in the first place.
