This blog relates to a consultation I had with a GP Dr Anwar Haq who practices at Lime Square Medical Centre in Openshaw Manchester on 17th July 2018 which I recorded and obtained the notes which you can listen to and read here.
It’s been a strange experience reviewing my medical notes and discovering the effects of the medical gaze first-hand, particularly when I get to view myself as both object and subject as I have my memories of the consultation, the recording I took, and now my medical notes.
The notes demonstrate the power of the physician to construct and distort the reality of the consultation. The physician’s perspective reigns supreme whilst the patient’s is relegated to mere footnotes or even erased entirely.
The superiority of the physician (and hence inferiority of the patient) must be reinforced.
The physician does not fail to ask about symptoms rather it is the patient who fails to explain them.
Patients merely SELF-diagnose and SELF-medicate and any such attempts are to be frowned upon and discouraged, preferably with a sarcastic remark about googling one’s own symptoms. One cannot have the patient diagnosing and treating themselves.
Only doctors diagnose.
Only doctors prescribe.
In the new religion, only doctors can identify and forgive sin, prescribing the punishments to appease the god of health.
It is the patient who “expresses different strange ideas” not the physician who lacks knowledge or competence or understanding of these ideas.
BUT “strange ideas” are not clinical opinion, they are not even honest opinion.
Honest opinion would be that the physician does not understand the ideas, or that they disagree with them. Or indeed that the ideas are nonsense or twaddle.
“Strange ideas” crosses the rubicon from honest opinion to objective fact. Ideas are either objectively strange or they are not.
Just because the physician finds them strange does not make them so.
Just because the physician means to express opinion does not mean they cannot, drunk on their own power and arrogance, float into the choppy waters of objective fact.
In the past this misrepresentation of the consultation, of the facts and of reality would go unnoticed and unchallenged.
But it’s 2018.
GDPR (as enacted by DPA 2018) is in force. Patients can EASILY check their medical records for free at anytime. Mobile phones can secretly record and are owned by nearly everyone. Tiny little spy audio and video recording devices are easily and cheaply available to make covert recordings.
This deceit and conceit is no longer tenable. The physician can no longer position themselves as the authority, as superiority. They can no longer construct reality for their own purposes and benefit.
This can only be a good thing.
Glitter Resist 