Why Doctors Fire Their Patients
From ghosting to outright dismissal
A few years ago, Christina Thielst, a health care administrator based in Santa Barbara, California, called her primary care doctor for an appointment. She’d been experiencing some alarming symptoms — fatigue, numbness, pain in her limbs — and she wasn’t getting anywhere with the neurologist she’d been seeing, who advised only physical therapy and time, even as things got increasingly worse.
So she left a message with her doctor’s office manager, then waited. And waited. But the call back never came. (Thielst was eventually diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome after seeing a different physician, this time a neuromuscular specialist.)
“I was ghosted,” she says. Her theory is that one of two things happened: Either the doctor didn’t communicate clearly with her staff, or the person at the desk never passed on messages. Either way, though, the result is the same. “You just feel like your doctor wasn’t there for you.”
A study of primary care doctors from 2017 found nine out of 10 have dismissed a patient. And that doesn’t even take into account the patients like Thielst, who were de facto dismissed by a doctor who never returned their calls.
As frustrating as it can be to suddenly find yourself without a physician, the average…
