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It is so funny how ableists are like “don’t define yourself by your disability!” but you ask what “defining yourself by your disability” means and they reveal it is literally just mentioning it. THEY are the ones who define you by and see you as nothing more than your disability.

@Qrow_feather This is amazing. “Nah anxiety is just a TikTok trend, I’m here for actual diagnostics.”

I’m going to start just telling doctors “no it can’t be anxiety that’s way too overdiagnosed” and see how it makes their tiny feelings move

@kananaskinyeti A big part of pursuing a medical degree for many is the promise of prestige, societal status, & wealth. Facing the reality that patients prioritize actions over suffixes & that respect isn’t a just free gift with purchase is a big shock for them. The good doctors aren’t offended.

I don’t get why doctors feel so offended by people sharing their actual experiences about them. Surely they know how problematic a lot of their colleagues are. I say this as a teacher, who is never personally offended when other people tell me how terrible other teachers are.

To briefly paraphrase the majority of humanity over the last half decade or so into two basic but pertinent governing philosophies: “I don’t care if other people die, I just wanna eat brunch” And “Why is everyone so shitty now? What happened?”

@HustleBitch_ It's fucking Covid. There's over 500k medical articles and scientific studies talking about this. I'm so tired, we've been trying to warn people for years and y'all are addicted to this pretend fucking mystery causing everyone to be sick all the time It's Covid

@pot8um I got the Covid infection that destroyed my life from a doctor’s office. I’ve had other doctors say “no you didn’t” and “I don’t believe that” and “no patients have gotten sick in my office.” Oh my bad, I didn’t realize viruses are stop at your special doorway! Magical thinking.

before handwashing was the norm, pregnant patients were urged to self-advocate by making their dr wash their hands they’d reply with “a gentleman’s hands never get dirty” MDs’ egos remain bloated in a post-2020 world it’s just a respirator, you actual adult babies! get a grip!

@JackHadfield14 My two safe foods are a plain steak and cassava root. Same exact meal every day for 3 straight years. We are similar record holders I think. A little salt, a little olive oil. Water. Not a single medicine has worked, many make me worse.

Due to MCAS my diet consists of ONLY sweet potatoes & beef mince. 800g of sweet potatoes and 300g of mince for breakfast, lunch, dinner, every day for 3 years. And I’ve recently realised I probably eat more sweet potatoes per year than anyone in the western world. Great record.

@anishmoonka Some humans die suddenly without warning too, no knowledge it was coming. That doesn’t mean plenty of humans don’t also know they’re dying when they’re dying slowly or in their final moments. Not sure how one negates the other.

@anishmoonka My cat is scared of other cats but doesn’t react to itself in the mirror at all. It’ll also look at me in the mirror & respond as if we were looking at each normally. Despite prior fear, this same cat mourned when our second cat died, crying, sleeping near her, bringing her toys.

I really wanted this one to be true. The idea of a cat feeling its last good days slip away, walking off somewhere quiet to die on its own terms, with a kind of dignity most of us will never manage. It makes a weird sort of sense when life gets heavy. You get to bow out alone, without dragging anyone through the slow fade. The cat knows something we don't. Except the cat doesn't know anything. The cat has no idea what is happening to it. Your pet has no clue it is dying. Cats come from the African wildcat, a lone desert hunter that humans started living with around 10,000 years ago, somewhere near what is now Iraq. That ancestor spent its whole life getting very good at one thing: never looking sick or weak in public. A limping wildcat gets eaten by the nearest hyena. So when a cat feels rough, it finds somewhere small and hidden and waits the rough feeling out. The cat is running a very old survival reflex. The philosophy is all in our heads. The fluffy thing asleep on your couch runs the same program whether it has a cold or full kidney failure. They almost certainly do not know they are ending. Cats fail the mirror test, which is the basic check for whether an animal understands the reflection is itself. Chimps pass it. Dolphins do too, along with elephants, orcas, and a few birds like magpies. Cats look into the mirror, see another cat, get bored, and walk off. You cannot really picture your own death if you cannot even picture yourself. The animals that do seem to actually grasp death show it by staying close to it. Elephants come back to the bones of dead relatives for years. Chimps have been seen grooming and cleaning the teeth of a dead group member. Cats do nothing like that. What cats do have is a body that tells on itself. 200 million smell receptors (we have about 5 million) and a very sharp sense of what is going wrong inside. They register that something feels deeply, horribly off, which is a very different thing from knowing they are dying. There is also a quieter truth most people skip. Plenty of cats drop dead with no ceremony at all. Heart attacks, blood clots, strokes, a bad fall off something high. Whatever romantic walk into the bushes you are picturing never happens for most of them, because they do not have time for it. The cats we remember "choosing" to die alone are only the ones who had a few extra hours to hide first. The rest just die on the kitchen floor. We remember the poetic ones and quietly forget the rest. The instinct that makes a sick cat disappear from us is much older than grace. It is fear, handed down intact from a small wild thing that could not afford to look weak in front of anything with teeth. We read that fear as dignity because we need to read it as something. Because we like the idea of going out quiet and on our own terms. Because most of us suspect we will not get to. Maybe this is why the myth sticks. The story is not really about cats at all. It is about the hope that somewhere out there, there is a version of the end where you finally get to stop performing. The cat is just hiding. The dignity was something we added, because we needed it to be there.

@DisabledDoctor @psychunseen Every time I’ve compared answers btw my doc & an LLM, the LLM is more current on the research, is more mindful of things that would cause me adverse reactions, doesn’t accuse me of being anxious, and will integrate findings from my whole health picture not just one specialty.

Unfortunately I think asking physicians for medical advice is also often a bad idea (many suck, are bigoted, fail to recognize their own biases, and few to none are actually properly trained as scientists given an MD is a trade degree). So until MDs do better, people are probably going to look for answers elsewhere, even if LLMs shouldn’t be trusted to evaluate research (and their use should be limited given energy demands and bias). But I’d put them on par with most MDs anyway…

Lots of mounting evidence that asking chatbots for medical advice is a bad idea. Within health topics where misinformation abounds, chatbots give problematic answers about half the time. Garbage in, garbage out. bmjopen.bmj.com/content/16/4/e…

@amxxny97 Docs who have no interest learning from their patients are totems of arrogance and ignorance. You should not be in practice if this is your mentality. Medicine is an evolving science and observations are often made in the clinic first, explored in research, then reach practice.

@pot8um When I declined to take my mask off at a doc appt bc I acquired the infection that disabled me at a doc appt where I had to unmask for a scope, the doc rolled his eyes. “You didn’t get Covid in a doctor’s office.” We’re back to the “a gentleman’s hands are never unclean” era.

these shitty MDs refuse to recognize SARS-CoV-2 as an ongoing pandemic in 2026 they routinely expose their patients & coworkers to preventable airborne pathogens because they won't wear a respirator i invite them to dismount their high horse because they are laughably unserious

@cubbies914 @jewstein3000 Sure, and then they don’t keep up with the current research. They’ll Google stuff right in front of you & haven’t even heard of your dx. A pt living with it 24/7 reads the lit & has more experience, 100% yes. It takes 17 yrs for research to reach the clinic, medicine is slow af.

@jewstein3000 Or maybe you have an unreasonably high ego and pride to think that you know better than the people that did 8-10 years of schooling to get to where they are.

Doctors hate it when I say 95% of them are useless at best and harmful at worst, but that's my experience! I don't know what to tell you. Maybe your colleagues are fun and nice to you but really bad at their jobs. Maybe you're not as good as you think. 1/

@witchdrkochi @hanna_pssd @jewstein3000 I had chest pain and difficulty breathing and the ER let me sit for 8 hours before sending me home with no scans. The next time it happened I stayed home because I’d rather die there than amongst you assholes in a freezing room under fluorescent lights.

@hanna_pssd @jewstein3000 Then the next time you're having chest pain or breathing difficulty, open chatgpt or claude and get yourself treated 💁 But nah, you ain't gonna do that when your life is at risk 😂 All this chronic disability illness act will drop the moment you ACTUALLY get sick lol

@dickandtinasson @jewstein3000 Literally proving the point

@jewstein3000 I do enjoy retards.

@AndrewJSauer Wow, a white male doctor with an injury that’s easily scanned & diagnosed had a great experience with doctors? What a cool story! I bet all these complex chronic illness patients that are gaslit for 8-10 years before even getting a diagnosis really learned a lesson reading this!

I do not understand all the doctor-hating that seems to fill so much space online. I say that as a physician, yes. And also as someone who has now been on the other side of the bedrail. Of course, there are bad doctors. No profession is exempt from that. But the worst examples often consume all the attention, and in doing so, they can obscure something deeply true: great doctors bring hope, healing, and restoration into people’s lives every single day. I know that differently now. When I was the patient, lying on the ground with a shattered kneecap, staring at imaging that showed my patella in pieces, watching my knee fill with blood, feeling pain that seemed impossible to control, and fearing I might never walk normally again, I was not thinking about abstractions. I was thinking about disability. About loss. About whether life and physical ability, as I knew them, had just changed forever. Then I met the surgeon who reconstructed my knee. I will never forget Archie Heddings. He showed me the images and explained exactly what he would do. Piece by piece, he walked me through how he would reconstruct what had been broken. Screws. Tape. Sutures. Precision. Skill. Calm. He was quietly confident, never overstated. At one point I just bluntly asked, “Doc, can you fix this?” He looked at me, nodded calmly, and said, “Andrew, this is what I do. I fix broken, smashed stuff every day, all day. I will do my job, and you do your job with PT. You will walk, run, ski, and hike again.” That moment brought tears to my eyes. It also brought hope back into my soul. He booked the OR for the next day. Now, just 14 weeks after surgery, I am back seeing patients. During my last week rounding in the hospital, I climbed 160 flights of stairs. I can flex my knee to 130 degrees. I am not all the way back yet, but I am back in motion, back in purpose, and back in my life as a father and giving back to my patients and the world around me as best as I can. My surgeon is not God. But I will say this without hesitation: through his hands, his judgment, his training, and his care, he changed the trajectory of my life. So, when I hear sweeping contempt for doctors, I think now about moments like this. And it is much more personal. Sometimes the people who speak most dismissively about physicians have simply never had their moment yet, the moment when they are scared, hurting, vulnerable, and utterly dependent on someone with the training and courage to do what almost no one else can do. When that moment comes, they may understand. Doctors can do far more than treat disease or repair injury. Sometimes, they give people their lives back. Tell your doctor you appreciate him or her. A simple genuine thank you will really make a difference.

@statelessmed Rare?? I’ve had docs dismiss me just bc a med they rx’d hurt me & when I simply informed them, they told me to seek care elsewhere. I wasn’t rude, I wasn’t even accusatory! They’ll dismiss you on a hair trigger if any part of your interaction threatens their ego or self image.

This is only true in the ER and that’s due to EMTALA. In every other setting a physician has every right to stop seeing a patient. It’s actually shocking how rarely this occurs and that’s a testament to the obligation physicians feel towards their patients.

A reminder, especially for liberals: Fauci himself said 3300 daily cases was the threshold for gaining control of the pandemic - and that was for a much less transmissible version of COVID. This "lull" is 79x higher than that. The pandemic is ongoing and out of control.

@Dr_JSA Literally no one said that was the issue. How are so many of you in practice when you don’t have the reading comprehension necessary to pass a PSAT? Learn to read.

The outrage over this is something. If you want to tell doctors your diagnosis and take issue with them questioning it, just waive your right to sue. I've personally had a patient complain of heartburn when they were having a heart attack... So yeah, I'm asking questions.