Told my sleep doc to "stop practicing sleep medicine"

[MrGrumpy]

LOL

This past August, I got absolutely tired and disgusted of the sleep doctor Ive been using since June 2011. I had a major complication after a tonsillectomy surgery in 2013, could not tolerate my old pressures and subsequently, fell apart completely.

I fired the guy, told him to his face, "I dont think you ever even bothered to try hard, I dont think you are any good at sleep medicine and I am asking you, as a patient, to stop practicing sleep medicine BECAUSE you are not any good at it."

He got so upset he slammed the door on me when he left. LMAO

I felt relieved afterwards, felt like a huge weight was lifted off of my shoulders. The guy had been taking my insurance money for several years while doing very little to actually straighten things out after the tonsillectomy. Refused to order a new sleep titration study, just acted like other than losing weight, he had nothing to offer.

Any of you ever chewed your sleep doctor out like that right before you terminate them? This is like the second or third sleep doc Ive had to terminate since 2011

[Janknitz]

I'll bet that felt great!

Some sleep docs genuinely like the challenges of sleep medicine and really want to help their patients. But there's also a good number who want to do sleep med because there's little or no direct contact with patients. And sometimes (not always) it can be a cash cow if you can crank a lot of volume through a sleep lab and make most of your money "consulting" with PCp's.

And some doctors get hidebound over time. The bag of tricks is limited and if they aren't going to get paid more to think outside the box why bother? That sounds like your doctor.

[LinkC]

Wow. I wanna be like Grumpy...

[mouthbreather72]

Mine was pleasant but basically just going through the motions. Upon my last visit, he informed me that he was retiring in two days, so I would have to find a new sleep specialist. No great loss to me, as there was no relationship between us.

I did fire a primary care doctor once. I told him point blank that if my requiring ACTUAL medical care from him was such a problem I wouldn't bother him ANYMORE for ANYTHING. He was such a jerk - always jealous if I made an appointment with someone else at the practice, like a woman scorned, even though the only reason I saw other people was because he was always too busy with other patients since he only worked three days a week. What a jackass!

My new primary is very nice and actually sits down, looks me in the eye, asks me questions and LISTENS to my answers. The one I fired always had his back to me, typing on his computer while I was talking. One time, I looked over his shoulder and noticed he didn't even type what I really said. I made him backspace and get my comments right. Oh, he hated that...

I'm glad you fired yours and know it must have felt great!

[MrGrumpy]

It did feel good because the bad feelings stemmed from frustration over an almost three year period. Where I had a problem that was not getting resolved by this guy and yet, he was seeing me several times a year, paying him a $25 copay each visit and then he'd bill my insurance for hundreds of dollars a visit. And do diddly to help me address the problems of suboptimal CPAP therapy.

I even had to ASK the guy to try me on a BiPap! He got angry about that!

On the other hand, it is a PITA and was stressful, because it made me feel like, "wow, Ive wasted three years almost with this idiot doctor." I felt like I was being a combination of patronized, played (for insurance money) and blown off all rolled into one. He is a foreign doctor, wears a turban on his head and I always got the feeling there was some resentment of me being a WASP.

Anyway, I encourage anybody reading this, who is not getting anywhere with your current CPAP therapy and you are suffering. FIRE THAT LAZY SLEEP DOCTOR! Find a new sleep doctor!

[MrGrumpy]

Oh yeah, I could also tell this guy was really, really, REALLY not used to patients talking to him the way I did to him. I talked to him like I'd talk to a dog. I was angry, but more sardonic and more like, "man, youre an idiot" more than anything else. He even admitted to me "if I had thought about his competence level?" and I replied, "yeah I have and several other people Ive talked to about you have as well."

Some of these doctors, I dont even know why they are even IN medicine. Its like, "WHY ARE YOU EVEN HERE??????" Its like, some of them just want to get your copay, bill your health insurance, take your temperature and pulse and blood pressure, chit chat and bs with you for ten or fifteen minutes and thats it. If you have complaints like, "doctor, my sleep quality is still really poor, its really non restorative, I wake up in the morning feeling hung over and I did not drink the night before," (untreated apnea or undertreated apnea makes me feel hung over feeling when I get up and during the day...its like I go around in a haze). And the guy just ignores my complaints.