In a lot of ways addiction is similar to most other fields of medicine, but there’s one aspect of the job I didn’t anticipate when I started: I spend a very large part of my day badmouthing other doctors.
It’s not an intentional thing; I have no grudge or problem with any other physician. And it’s something I would like to avoid if at all possible. The only problem is that the vast majority of my patients come to my practice with deep-seated, damaging misconceptions about themselves and their disease, most of which they got from other doctors, and I can’t do anything to help them without first convincing them that those other doctors are wrong.
It’s a conversation I have at least a dozen times a day. “But my doctor told me I’ll stop needing the medication!”, a patient will say, and I have no choice but to tell them that their doctor is wrong. I don’t know why; I don’t whether that doctor has just been misinformed, whether they’re expecting the disease of addiction to react like a short-term problem (say, in infection) rather than long-term one (like high blood pressure). I don’t know whether that doctor has any training at all in this field. The only thing I know is that the patient has been receiving bad information from trusted healthcare providers, and I need to do something to fix that.
This is another, indirect consequence of the lack of addiction education among physicians; it deteriorates the physician-patient relationship. If I can correct a patient’s misinformation, they will naturally start to wonder why their doctor told them something that turned out to be untrue, and they might start to worry about the information they receive from their doctor on other topics. I have no desire to cause a patient to doubt their other doctors; but when they come to me parroting misconceptions their doctor told them, I don’t have much choice.
Occasionally I am able to speak with a patient’s managing physician, but even then the routine never seems to change much. This is just one more reason we need to raise the level of addiction education in the healthcare field; patients need to be able to trust the information they get from their healthcare providers, and that can only happen when those providers are well-informed in all areas. Hopefully one day we will all be able to stop working at cross-purposes and focus on improving the lives of people in pain.