How to Get Your Doctor to Take You Seriously
Advice from patients, physicians, and advocates on making sure your concerns are heard
Around 12 years ago, at age 19, Brittany Bella Graham began experiencing severe lower-back pain and a constant throbbing ache in her right side. “It felt like a swift kick,” she recalls, “almost like someone was hitting me in the ribs.” At first, the pain happened only when she stood for a long time, but then it became more frequent. Soon, she felt severe pain whenever she stood or sat — in other words, constantly.
Graham, now an advertising consultant based in Los Angeles, was understandably worried. But, she says, her doctor was less so, declaring the pain the result of an external injury — a pulled muscle, perhaps. Graham was prescribed muscle relaxers, which gave her an ulcer and did nothing to alleviate the pain. It was only once Graham threatened to change providers, she says, that her doctor relented and ordered an MRI, which revealed a cancerous mass on her pancreas.
Graham’s experience, dramatic though it may be, follows a story arc that, for many, is frustratingly familiar. When I began asking around for people who had experienced something like this, the response was immediate and overwhelming. For Tess Townsend, a freelance journalist in Sacramento, the issue was…
