Do you get cold feet when you are forced to change doctors?

AprilSun

AprilSun

Senior Member
I am having to change GP doctors and I'm dreading it terribly. My old doctor is retiring and moving his practice so far away that it makes it hard to keep going to him so I'm changing and I don't want to go! I keep telling myself it's my body and I have complete control over what he does and what I take but it's not helping my feelings. He can not make me take medications that I don't want to take. I just hope he believes me when I tell him how sensitive I am to medications and what it does to me. It took so long to make a believer out of my old doctor and right when I finally did, this happens and I have to start over. Like I said, I'm dreading this so much! Are you like this when you change doctors?
 

I definitely have "white coat syndrome". My blood pressure goes sky high when I go to the doctor. I checked it every day for months before my next appointment and it was normal. Back at the doctor's office it shot up again. The doctor had me bring in my blood pressure cuff to see if it matched theirs. Good grief, I felt like they thought I was lying to them. Then she had me stop by the health department to have them check my blood pressure. By the time I drove the two miles to get there, my blood pressure was perfectly fine. The nurse from the health department called my doctor to report the results (like I couldn't be trusted to do it). I felt like everyone was disappointed because they couldn't prescribe the newest blood pressure medication for me.

AARP had an article about this a while back saying that it was fear of the unknown that caused the anxiety. I would disagree. It's fear of the known- I know exactly what's going to happen, what the conversation will be.

Good luck with finding a new doctor. I think that is one of the most stressful things one has to do.
 
dkay said:
I definitely have "white coat syndrome". My blood pressure goes sky high when I go to the doctor. I checked it every day for months before my next appointment and it was normal. Back at the doctor's office it shot up again. The doctor had me bring in my blood pressure cuff to see if it matched theirs. Good grief, I felt like they thought I was lying to them. Then she had me stop by the health department to have them check my blood pressure. By the time I drove the two miles to get there, my blood pressure was perfectly fine. The nurse from the health department called my doctor to report the results (like I couldn't be trusted to do it). I felt like everyone was disappointed because they couldn't prescribe the newest blood pressure medication for me.

AARP had an article about this a while back saying that it was fear of the unknown that caused the anxiety. I would disagree. It's fear of the known- I know exactly what's going to happen, what the conversation will be.

Good luck with finding a new doctor. I think that is one of the most stressful things one has to do.
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Thank you! I keep telling myself this doctor might be easier to "train" and convince I'm not going to take just anything.
 

I think I’m pretty lucky I’ve had the same GP for 30 years, I’d think he will be around to see me out.
Here in Australia it’s becoming hard to have a regular GP every time my daughter or grandaughter has to go to the GP she sees a different doctor ..think the days of your GP actually knowing you has finished
 
Kadee46 said:
I think I’m pretty lucky I’ve had the same GP for 30 years, I’d think he will be around to see me out.
Here in Australia it’s becoming hard to have a regular GP every time my daughter or grandaughter has to go to the GP she sees a different doctor ..think the days of your GP actually knowing you has finished
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It's hard to find a doctor here that will still take Medicare. I thought I would never find one between not taking Medicare and not taking new patients, there wasn't much choice left. I just made an appointment with the first one that was accepting both.
 
April. I see your hesitation. Change can be difficult, especially when it comes to doctors. Maybe your current GP can recommend some to you? About 11 years ago I needed to switch docs, but for different reasons. I had found that my doc at the time was very condescending and not talking me seriously. I did my research, and even though, at the time, I found a doctor who had a speciality in gerontology. Even though I was ONLY in my 50's at the time, I conceded that I was not getting any younger. LOL. Long story short, I did an initial visit, interviewed HER as it were, explained why I wanted to leave my old doc. I found her great, easy to talk with and I kept going back. One thing I like is that she purpously keeps her practice smaller than other docs in her practice just so she can give her patients more time and not rush them

Good luck to you
 
My GP moved from the west side of town due to the huge house where he practiced being pulled down due to extensive roadworks

He left that practise ,and started at a new one in the eastern suburbs

I concider myself lucky he choose me as one of his patients to continue seeing him at the new practace, if I wanted to
I’m bulked billed so it costs me nothing to see him about once every 5-6 months.
He is in the position now that he can’t take on any extra patients so I’m glad I decided to continue seeing him
 
Kadee46 said:
I think I’m pretty lucky I’ve had the same GP for 30 years, I’d think he will be around to see me out.
Here in Australia it’s becoming hard to have a regular GP every time my daughter or grandaughter has to go to the GP she sees a different doctor ..think the days of your GP actually knowing you has finished
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Same thing here...our GP's have become something akin to traffic cops....if you have this they point you there....got that ? they point you here....It seems they treat almost nothing themselves..All they do is tell ya where to go!...hell my ex-wife did that very well....<grin>
 
I have to change also. Seems my doctor got himself in big trouble and lost his license by letting someone in his group practice medicine who wasn't licensed and he knew about it.. He probably had just a few more years until retirement so he just bowed out. His son is now taking over. I guess I'll go with someone else in his group. At least all the records are there. I don't go to the doctor on a regular basis and don't take any meds so I'll wait it out.
 
I've had to change drs 3 times in the last several years due to one retiring & the others moving away. I WANT to change away from the one I have now because I've lost confidence in him due to his misdiagnosis recently of some obvious things that ended up causing me a lot of discomfort. Only thing is my health plan is quite short of primary care docs. I plan to call Member Services tomorrow & see what they can do for me. The changes before just caused mild anxiety even with the previous ones I had liked each of them. Would cause a lot more to stay with one I no longer trust.
 
my doctor retired a few months back and I went for a check up at the person who took over his practice and was not a fan......two weeks ago I set up an appointment at the VA, we shall see, we shall see.
 
Cold feet?

No

But after the first visit digital exam, my hind end feels a little funny

Seems every time I get a new Dr, they make sure to do the finger wave

Anymore, just hearing the snapping of a rubber glove tends to make me clench
 
I have moved 13 times so I frequently change doctors. I usually have to go through 2-5 that will give me the same medications I have been taking for decades. I also am a firm believer is taking responsibility for my own health and many doctors expect to be obeyed. Their idea of health is taking certain test based on age as if one size fits all. They also prescribe the drugs they personally are familiar with or ones that give them kickbacks. It should also be noted that a lot of doctors barely passed Medical school or do not keep up with modern medicine.

I have been here for 8 years and am on doctor #6. This one is a keeper. He is in charge of the entire medical staff and only handles a select group of patients like me who are not sheeple when it comes to doctors. My family on both sides lived into their 90s an avoided doctors and most medications. Even my old doctor friends advised staying away from doctors as much as possible. Last year I had to listen to lectures about healthy living from my doctor. He would get on my case every visit. Then he got something and was in the hospital for months. So much for his healthy living.

I also have a problem in that I have a very high IQ and ran a national company. I am very alpha so I tend to push back when doctors push me towards what they want me to do. I do my own research and half the time know more about some drugs than my doctor does. They also do not seem to know drug equivalencies when they switch my medications. One doctor switched my medication so that I had to take 10 pills to equal the medication it was replacing. On another occasion I was given a prescription that was supposed to be 10 mg but written up as 100mg. Good thing my pharmacist told me it was way too high.

I have been given wrong test, got wrong results and wrong treatments. Thank God for nurses who seem to know more than doctors do many times. I have a friend whose back was so bad that I used to have to help him walk. His doctor sent him to a Podiatrist for some reason and he blindly went. After the Podiatrist milked him as much as he could, my friend still had not improved. I told him to see a Neurosurgeon as I had done with a similar problem. He did and sure enough he had a spinal problem that required surgery and that fixed him up. To top it off his wife's back starts hurting her and sure enough the same doctor sent her to a Podiatrist who also did not help her. She ended up with a Neurosurgeon and he fixed her problem.

My wife was misdiagnosed and subject to painful injections into her spine as well as medications that ended up putting her into the Emergency room. I also had a similar problem that put me in the hospital for 8 days. I switched doctors while in the hospital. Turns out my Wife simply needed a new hip despite another doctor telling her it was a spinal problem. He was wrong when we found the best surgeon around who said it was easy to test if the spine was the cause and surprised that her previous doctors did not run the test. I had a mole tested and it seems around here that doctors like to use the term "pre-Cancerous" to get people to have surgery. Most hear the word Cancer and panic. I had a mole tested and it was said that it was pre-cancerous. The doctor who did the lab work also was the surgeon so he would benefit from the surgery. I went in for other skin problems but they were ignored. They made it sound like I would get cancer if I did not consent to their surgery. They even tried to get me to sign a form stating that I refused treatment using the word "cancer" over and over.

I did my own research and found a few things. Most hear things like if you do this you lower your risk by 30% or whatever, so they do it. I ask what is my risk to begin with an few can tell me. In the instance of the "cancer" scared tactics I did my own research going to a government site that showed my risk was 1.35% of getting cancer if I did not have the rest of the mole removed due to the fact that I do not lay in the sun an only have been sunburnt about 3 times in my life. Is I declined because a 30% increase was nothing to worry about. Furthermore I read that if I did get cancer it had very high odds that it would not appear where the mole was but rather someplace else. Seems that what I had was just a warning that there was a small chance I could get cancer sand removing the rest of the mole would not do much since the chances of the cancer developing here was very small. 9 year later and no problems. BTW, The dark round thing growing on my leg that I originally went in for was diagnosed as a spider bite. The thing growing on my hand was diagnosed as a wart. Well the spider bite is now a mole and the wart disappeared in a few weeks on its own.

My cousin who is a family doctor said that about 80% of his patients would get better if they did not visit him because their conditions would get better on their own. Like people going to doctors for viral infections thinking anti bionics would fix it. I know lots of people who run to the doctor for every new pain they get instead of waiting to see if it goes away on its own. In Florida I notice a lot of people with bandages on their skin due to all the Dermatologist pushing surgery or "pre-cancerous" moles. Heck, all my skin is pre-cancerous. I am not fighting a diagnoses of Type 2 Diagnoses. My A1 was very low at 5.1 for years. One test showed it at 7.4, a very large increase. They tasted me again 6 months later and I was at 5.0. They acted like it was a miracle and nurses came in to high five me thinking that I did things to reduce it. I did nothing. I ate the same and did not exercise any more than usual. In fact I ate more sugar an carbs because I was convinced that the test was wrong as were many different lab tests in my life. Sure enough with a worse diet my A1C went lower. My glucose level was normal as were all the other tests and yet my doctor refuses to change the diagnosis. When you have diabetes you need more testing and have to inform all other specialist. What got me mad was that our medical center is in partnership with United Health Care who is being accused of encouraging their doctors to diagnose more type 2 Diabetes because under a Medicare Advantage plan UHC gets a flat amount of money from Medicare to take care of me. If I am a high risk they get $2000 more a year, all for the same two yearly visits and test I have gotten all along. They are profiting off of a bad diagnosis and I went to the head guy who was very reluctant to overturn the doctor's diagnosis. It is like cops sticking together no matter what. My wife had lab results that showed she had renal failure all of a sudden and upon re-testing she was normal. I was tested once and told that my B12 level was less than that of a man 20 years older than me. I was given one single expensive shot and then I changed doctors. The next test showed my B12 as normal.

Sorry for the rant but every year over 200,000 people are killed by preventable medical mistakes and yet all the country's energy an money is directed at the anti gun movement as if that will prevent crazy people from killing others.
 
I don't get cold feet, but I remember when my VA doctor changed and the new one wouldn't write me an approval to buy a couple of prescriptions outside the VA Pharmacy that would cost less than the VA charged. She told me that she almost lost her license for doing that for a Veteran that, apparently, done something illegal with the approval she gave him. Other than that, have never had a problem with any VA doctor I've had.

But, when we move, neither of us will have the PCP's we currently have and have had for some years now.
 
Ive had the same dr since I moved to Fresno 14 yrs ago but I always go to the NP and those have changed a few times.

Think there have been 4 since Ive been going and I did like some better than others.
 
It's over!!!!!! He was really nice. He tried to put me on several different medications/vitamins but I just told him how I react to medications and I didn't want to take any more now. He tried to start me on Vitamin D and I told him I had tried that but didn't have good results with it because of side effects. He tried to get me to get another mammogram but I explained to him that after I witnessed my husband's reaction to chemo, I had decided I wasn't taking it regardless. So if I get breast cancer, I don't want to know it because all it would do is worry me to death and I shouldn't do anything about it because of the chemo side effects. Yes, they could take my breast off but it would still worry me to death so I would rather not. My husband even told me if I ever got cancer, he said, "Don't you ever take chemo because if you did, it would kill you." He had witnessed all these years of my reactions to medications. This doctor tried to get me to take a bone density test and I told him I've had one but after what I found out from a friend back from when we were teenagers, what teeth she has left looks awful now and they were so pretty when we were young. She told me it was the bone density medications that did it. I looked up the side effects on-line and that is one of the side effects. Generations after generations got by without all of this stuff and I feel at my age, why start now. At least if one of these conditions kills me, I will die happy and not miserable from side effects! After all of my refusals, at least he just looked and acted amused rather than mad like my old doctor.
 
Cold feet??? Definitely! We've switched doctors because there were some "practices" our former doctor did that we did not approve of. It's not easy finding a different doctor.

My husband went to the "new" doctor in June to get established. The office was packed and we waited over an hour to get in to his appointment. I have rescheduled my appointment with him 2 times. If I wouldn't have to have a Rx for blood pressure, I'd skip it altogether!
 
Colleen said:
Cold feet??? Definitely! We've switched doctors because there were some "practices" our former doctor did that we did not approve of. It's not easy finding a different doctor.

My husband went to the "new" doctor in June to get established. The office was packed and we waited over an hour to get in to his appointment. I have rescheduled my appointment with him 2 times. If I wouldn't have to have a Rx for blood pressure, I'd skip it altogether!
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You sound like me because that's exactly what I thought too! I have to take blood pressure medicine and I thought if I didn't need refills for my prescriptions, I wouldn't fool with a doctor. Especially since it's so hard to find one that's taking new patients AND if we have medicare.
 

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