What’s up with doctors who are always 1 to 2 hours late for your and everyone else’s appointment?
I once showed up for an 8:30 am doctor’s appointment to get a standing room (outside) greeting!
That’s just rude and disrespectful in my mind.
And doctors even have their patients making excuses for them. They’ll say things like, “The doctor must have had an emergency.”
What? The doctor would have to have an emergency every 5 minutes to be this late – All The Time!
And even if that were the case, shouldn’t a doctor be smart enough to adjust their schedule? Or could they hire someone smart enough like other professions do?
Is it possible that all doctors can be following this same pattern of incompetence? A pattern where they never learn from the day before or from other doctors having the same problem?
Or perhaps they are blatantly lying?
I’m pretty sure it’s not just me noticing this behaviour.
I’m willing to bet that your doctor treats you the same way. That you have had the first appointment of the day yet when you arrived found that you’re not the only one waiting.
Do you think the other patients are just showing up an hour or two early as a precaution? I don’t think so.
So What’s With That Doctors?
Have you ever asked your doctor why you always have to wait so long in the waiting room?
And if you have, did they tell you the standard doctor’s answer, “We had an emergency.” Or give you some other concocted answer serving as a substitute for the truth?
But, if we assume the doctors aren’t lying to us, this answer should worry us. If you think about it, how incompetent can your doctor be?
Every day of your doctor’s working life, they relive the day before without learning a damn thing! Is that possible? And if it is, shouldn’t it make us nervous?
Every day doctors supposedly start their day with patient appointments spaced out appropriately. Let’s say in 15-minute increments.
But even at the start of every day, they are hours behind in seeing their patients.
Yes, you, the patient, will wait for an hour or more past your appointment time – Every time for the rest of your life!
Yes, your doctor, from the first day of opening their medical practice to the last, over 30 years or more, this will happen without fail – every day!
And all doctors follow this pattern of incompetence. They never learn from the day before or the experience of other doctors throughout history.
I think that’s scary.
What If You Were The Doctor?
What would you do if you were a doctor and noticed this problem with an overabundance of emergencies happening every day?
How long do you think it would be before you realized and thought, hey, this seems to be a pattern? Oh, and look, other doctors also seem to have this same problem. Duh …
Even if you were only a little smarter than a tree stump, wouldn’t you notice this has been happening for as long as anyone can remember? And perhaps even take a hint from that, that there is obviously something going on here that you need to fix.
And, being the first doctor ever to realize this as a problem, you may even become famous.
Especially if you considered spacing your patient’s appointments a little further apart so they don’t have to waste their lives away in your waiting room, but that would mean you had some empathy too.
And that’s also assuming that the doctors are incompetent and not pathological liars.
One study I saw showed that patients’ stress levels rose by 35% just by sitting in the waiting room. I wonder how much of that was due to the frustration of WAITING!
Doctors continue to stress us out more by making us wait longer in their waiting rooms.
Waiting rooms are filled with other patients with various diseases and medical afflictions, we can only hope and pray not to catch.