Contrasting patient experiences of their GP

Patient A: I’ve got a very good GP now, I have got a GP who actually knows what fibromyalgia is, he’s prepared just to sit and listen, he listens a lot, he’ll let me try new medications, obviously because of my science background I probably know more about fibromyalgia than he does because I read so much in research papers, but he’s very willing to let me be a guinea pig and to work with me, which I think is important with a doctor/patient relationship, you’ve got to work on this path of chronic pain together.

"I’ve got a very good GP now, I have got a GP who actually knows what fibromyalgia is, he’s prepared just to sit and listen"

But you’ve also got to be very honest with your doctor, you can’t just go out and start trying a new treatment without telling him, because then he can’t monitor what’s going on. My doctor likes to monitor what my drugs are doing, and if I want to start a new therapy I will go and tell him, I am going to start this now, and then we’ll discuss it and decide is this actually working, is it actually making any difference, so we can see if I’m wasting my money or not, but also I think you have to appreciate with your doctor what he can do and what he can’t do.

Like he cannot take your pain away, so there’s no point in keeping going to him and saying “Oh I’m still in this pain”, there’s nothing that he can specifically do, you have to accept his limits. Like he can refer you to a physiotherapist, he can refer you to occupational therapy; he can help you with...

So if I want a specific referral, I’ll go and say I need to see a physiotherapist at the moment and he’ll just do the referral or I think I need a bit more of this drug, can we just try it, rather than just experimenting on your own, which actually might be dangerous, because the interactions with the different drugs, he’s there to point me in the right direction so we work together and it works really well. But I don’t bother him all the time with things I know he can’t solve, because that is where the frustration gets in, yes it works well.

29-year-old female patient diagnosed with fibromyalgia – www.healthtalkonline.org

Patient B: The first appointment that we had with the doctor wasn’t actually my own GP. It was obviously my GP practice, but it wasn’t my GP and she was, negative’s maybe going a little bit too far, but her exact words to us were, because my husband came with me, “Of course this is very, very early on in your pregnancy and there’s no guarantee that you will actually go to full term.” And I mean I was quite horrified.

I just thought, “I really can’t believe you’ve just said that.” My husband was really quite upset by it, and really, you know, “We shouldn’t tell anybody and the risk must be huge,” and I said, “Well, no, it’s not. I mean, it’s something like, what, 25% or something?” I said, “But, you know, I’m really quite horrified that she said that.”

But she said, “But not of course that I’m suggesting that will happen but, you know, you are aware of that.” And I did actually mention it to my own GP when I went back the following week and said, you know, “If that is what she’s saying to other people, that could really, really upset people.”

33-year-old lecturer, four months pregnant – www.healthtalkonline.org

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