Doctor And Patient Conversation

They often do to get a second opinion or a specialist. And I'm glad they do, because I know I get the best health care. We are fortunate, because most of our doctors trained at Stanford or UCSF. My personal physician is from India, trained at Stanford, and refers me to other specialists all the time. Just saw my physician yesterday for my 'annual' check up.

About your care, yes. Doctors do not work in a vacuum and often need to consult about things.

About your personal life? No, and not even if the doctor is a psychiatrist - if they need consultations with colleagues, they will generally ask more general questions (e. g. I have a patient moving to a new city, versus I have a patient moving to Milwaukee from San Francisco). They will also not use your name, even if they are writing a paper about your particular syndrome (it might be something like Patient L is 37 years old and exhibiting anxiety symptoms about moving to a new city).

You have a physician-patient privilege in the United States and in many other countries.

I remember when I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks last year, my doctor asked if he could bring students to look at my 'wound.' I said yes.

That's a bit different than talking about a person's private life .

Proving violation of this trust, is sometimes very difficult to do in Court.

For example, about 1-2 years ago, a man went into surgery for a GI procedure. During the course of the surgery, the woman surgeon had some rather unpleasant ( and possibly sexist) comments to say about certain aspects of the male patient's anatomy,

When the man went into surgery ( or procedure) he put his cell phone into one of his socks and left the socks etc in the room, where the procedure was being performed. Unknown to either the patient or the physician, the man had left the cell phone on ( he forgot to turn it off).

When he went home and heard what had been recorded on his phone...Guess what...he sued his Doctor and won. In this case, the trust between Doctor and patient had been violated, but the patient had won.

The physician was terminated from her job.

That's a rather particular set of circumstances. I can definitely see why it had that outcome.

I have heard there is a forum like this for MD's where they share all the outrageous stories and quirky things patients do with each other.

I dated a doctor. She would tell me stories about her patients, either the ones she thought were amusing or the ones that were stressful to her. She never did it in a way that I would know who the patient was.

Doctor's are just human beings.

I think the Reader's Digest used to publish those stories.

Most of the time.