[rektide]

What a callous way to put it! Patients suffering from diseases & conditions aren't trying to swab some magic block-dust on problems. They have symptoms & are desperate for help. Their ability to invest time in & explore possible conditions doesn't match up to a medical degree, but it's still considerable, and in spite of there being a lot of fluff & misconstruable & useless information, there's a ton of real, valuable, & good information too.

It does have to suck to have a lot of badly informed people parroting silly ideas they casually picked up online. But to so callously write off everyone, to so easily disregard any opinion & information other than your own, with what limited time you've got to examine a patient? Detestable, just absolutely revileable: this person has deeply failed their oath.

I also don't think your scenario is fair. The customer isn't just showing up & ordering you around. As a doctor, the patient is the product. The product is speaking for itself, asking for help. It's also paying you fairly well for your time & services. And as I said above, there's a good chance the product is well informed about itself. To write this off as a case of idiots making pointless requests- I can not disagree hard enough about what a callous, disregardful view this is. There are plenty of times when yes, the patient has fed themselves garbage, the patient is way off base, but let them not be so easily out of hand dismissed, let not the workplace maintain such a sense of absolute smug over the idiot rubes of the world.

[Arainach]

>aren't trying to swab some magic block-dust on problems

That's exactly what patients are doing. Entire industries are built around this. People don't want to be told the hard answers to their problems, they want to do whatever they want and then take one tiny pill that causes weight loss, resistance to heart and respiratory disease, and increased libido.

>I also don't think your scenario is fair. The customer isn't just showing up & ordering you around

Read the stories. Watch the news. This is exactly what is going on. There is not a good chance that the patient knows what they're talking about - the overwhelming majority saw a quack on Facebook or Oprah saying something clearly wrong and stopped looking further because they want that one easy answer.

[rektide]

discarding & scorning all the public because there is some noteable contemporary upswell of problematic rank populist idiocracy about is not an elitism i can get behind.

if indeed a patient is requesting modern quackery, then yes, reject that. but simply turning up your nose at "Google Medical School" & dismissing all patient concerns blanketly is not ok.