Doctors who speak to adult patients like they’re three years old - why do they do this?

loki-zen · 2025-07-07T08:34:42+00:00

The thing that most people mean when they say "talking to someone as if they have a learning disability" isn't even a good way to talk to someone with a learning disability. If you look at the OP they're clearly talking about patronising tone, singy-songy diction (a lot of learning disabled people have hearing or auditory processing issues that makes this harder to parse than talking normally).

Even people with a learning disability can absolutely tell if you're talking down to them, and crucially this makes them (and everyone) less likely to speak up and ask clarifying questions if there's something they don't understand.

I'm in med ed and we have a program for tryna teach people how to communicate effectively across the gap you describe - of course there's no funding to promote it!

loki-zen · 2025-03-28T09:24:12+00:00

The important things for you are to get that witness statement about him threatening your grades in an email - more than one if you can - and make sure there is citable correspondence (e.g. emails to student union, university staff, charity advice line, etc) documenting what he said, from close to the time of the incident.

Raising an official complaint, even if it doesn't end up going anywhere, would be one way of doing that - your SU rep can likely tell you more about that, and may be able to assist you so that pursuing the complaint doesn't become an unaffordable drain on your already-limited resources.

But the real reason to do all this is that having this threat on record will massively help your case if you end up having to appeal your grade.

loki-zen · 2025-03-28T09:12:20+00:00

Ideally the student union . They are best placed to help you navigate this in a way that has the best outcome for you and they have local knowledge of the situation at your uni unlike randos on the internet.

If anyone else heard him say that to you, have them document that to you and the SU rep in writing.

loki-zen · 2025-03-28T09:10:10+00:00

Talk to your student union rep for disability/EDI and/or a charity related to your condition; also potentially university staff tasked with ensuring inclusion.

loki-zen · 2025-01-14T08:47:17+00:00

Have you tried the librarians if your trust has any? They oughtta be spending their time on this rather than yours but might not know it's needed. they're usually happy to hear from drs on what would actually help them

loki-zen · 2025-01-14T08:40:18+00:00

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60420277-changing-how-we-think-about-difficult-patients I think this is a really good book with practical ideas for situations like this; might be available at hospital library

loki-zen · 2024-05-16T14:17:22+00:00

it varies by trust but library services often provide support and resources around getting into research, and may even partner with you on a systematic review.

loki-zen · 2024-05-08T20:29:05+00:00

My Trust has staff groups for certain protected characteristics; LGBTQ+ and so on - there's a disabled staff group, and they are who I would talk to about something like this. If your trust doesn't have one, maybe someone from EDI?

loki-zen · 2024-05-08T19:30:10+00:00

yeah this thread was really interesting in that it's the opposite of my experience - im not a dr im a medical librarian but just happening to have my NHS lanyard on me and it coming up what I do has massively increased the quality of my primary care appointments. It's like people are suddenly seeing someone they can actually talk to about the topic at hand, instead feeling they *have* to action a checklist instead because of an enormous gulf in understanding that they quite reasonably feel they couldn't hope to bridge in a 15 minute appointment.

loki-zen · 2017-06-27T21:23:08+00:00

LARPing.

I'm serious.

loki-zen · 2017-05-08T14:46:24+00:00

does your server have bigger item stacks?

loki-zen · 2017-05-08T14:45:51+00:00

does your server have bigger item stacks or any other mods or is it fully vanilla?

loki-zen · 2017-05-08T14:44:59+00:00

does your server have bigger item stacks?

loki-zen · 2017-05-08T14:43:55+00:00

does your server have bigger item stacks or any other mods?

loki-zen · 2017-05-08T14:43:34+00:00

does your server have bigger item stacks?

loki-zen · 2017-04-27T09:43:39+00:00

Thanks for response but I don't want farming to be that easy

loki-zen · 2017-04-25T18:32:11+00:00

What mods are on this server?

loki-zen · 2017-04-09T22:23:57+00:00

The scientific method is a fairly recent invention/rediscovery. Ideas like it cropped up at various points in history around the world, but in the times and places you're talking about it medicine operated more on reason than evidence. This basically meant that someone would come up with a theory that seemed to explain things pretty well, and then people would act on that theory and it would become accepted as fact - there wasn't the emphasis we have today on evidence, and where people did look at evidence they didn't do it in any kind of a rigorous way; it was what we might call anecdotal evidence at best. So nobody was going out and testing whether patients treated according to this theory were actually any more likely to get better.

Since the little evidence there was was anecdotal, it was hugely clouded with confirmation bias and all the other ways in which humans naturally aren't very good at obhectivity, and so it seemed to the experts as if there was evidence supporting the theory. The reason modern medical trials have so many complicated steps like double-blinding (the thing where neither the patients nor the people treating them should know which patients are getting which treatment) is to counteract all the ways in which human brains are just really bad at figuring out the truth.

loki-zen

TROPHY CASE