# Are Doctors Taught That Most Of Their Patients Are Nuts? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 18, 2002, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848 "2002-10-18T16:57:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2002, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/21 "2002-10-20T20:37:03Z")
Words from my mentor, Dr. Philip Tumulty: Just because someone _is_ a hypochondriac doesn’t automatically mean they _aren’t_ sick! ---
**Author:** ![kambuckta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/53a042/32.png) [@kambuckta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kambuckta)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2002, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/22 "2002-10-20T22:11:38Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by lieu \* > \*\*Not for the meek: > [Even this guy’s only approaching about 22% nuts](http://www.idmtassociation.com/images/yamzon-4.jpg) \*\* Oh MY!! That is ONE decent pair of salada’s there. Bigger question though **lieu** is how you managed to find such a site…oogling the goolies for academic or personal reasons there?? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2002, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/23 "2002-10-20T22:36:34Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by bbeaty \* > \*\*In “Lost Art Of Healing”, Dr. Bernard Lown essentially agrees with Chimera above, that med school doesn’t teach the skills needed to expertly perform/analyze “history taking” (i.e. listening to patients,) and so contemporary med students assume that listening isn’t very important. Lown builds a case for a direct connection between doctors’ recent deafness to patients, and the recent huge rise of malpractice suits (‘recent’ being the last few decades.) > > His book is excellent, very much like Oliver Sacks’ books, full of interesting case histories and lots of brutal self-honesty. > > PS, Lown is the one who developed the modern cardiac defibrillator and was a key player in stopping heart attacks from being an automatic death sentence like they were back in the 60s. > Lost art of healing > [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/isbn=0345425979/](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/isbn=0345425979/) \*\* Lown may have been a great innovator, but heart attacks were not an automatic death sentence in the 60s and before. My father had a heart attack in 1949 and lived another 20 years. I had a heart attack in 1965 and here I am wasting time on the I-net, 37 years later. ---
**Author:** ![TheLoadedDog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/35a633/32.png) [@TheLoadedDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheLoadedDog)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/24 "2002-10-21T00:12:44Z")
This reminds me of one of my favourite _Far Side_ cartoons with the shrink writing “just plain nuts” on his notepad. My sister is a medical secretary, and has worked in the New South Wales public hospital system on and off for over a decade: she tells me that it’s not uncommon for doctors to write “FITH” or “Fith Virus” on a person’s record. The next doctor will know what it means: “Fucked In The Head”. Sad, but still kinda funny. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/25 "2002-10-21T02:28:19Z")
I’m working as a full-time emergency doc. And most of the patients I see have a physical problem. A proportion of doctors believe any patient with a problem THEY can’t see must (by exclusion) have a psychological disease. This often turns out to be false but does wonders for the ego. I’ve never heard of FITH, but I know no gastroenterologist with a special interest in IBS. ---
**Author:** ![Yeah](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/dbc845/32.png) [@Yeah](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yeah)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/26 "2002-10-21T02:43:55Z")
Talking about nutty patients and emergency departments reminds me of the interesting syndrome of delusional parasitosis. People with DP are convinced that they have parasites. They will sometimes bring in their “parasites” wrapped in a piece of paper. But there’s nothing in the paper but bits of dust and lint. They may go from doctor to doctor getting negative test after negative test unable to shake their conviction that they have parasites. These people “have nothing physically wrong with them, but instead are … deluded…” But they are relatively rare. ---
**Author:** ![lieu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c2a13f/32.png) [@lieu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lieu)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/27 "2002-10-21T02:48:04Z")
“See doc, what bugs me…” ---
**Author:** ![bbeaty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/c0e974/32.png) [@bbeaty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bbeaty)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 6:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/28 "2002-10-21T06:31:43Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Yeah \* > It sounds like Dr. Lown didn’t get a very good medical education. Did he do some kind of study or did he just extrapolate his poor experience to all 100+ North American medical schools? He taught new doctors for several decades, and according to his book watched the listening skills of recent graduates degrade enormously over the years. > [@](#): > > Unfortunately, although some physicians do get excellent training in listening to their patients, many, in my experience, either never received the benefit of such training (such as Dr. Lown) or are too lazy to use it. Heh. Making assumptions about a book you haven’t read is bound lead to large, embarassing mistakes. Lown’s major point is that the usual medical training fifty years ago was much greater in the listening skills department, but that over the intervening decades this has decreased greatly, and is a major cause of contemporary malpractice incidents. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Hari Seldon \* > Lown may have been a great innovator, but heart attacks were not an automatic death sentence in the 60s and before. My father had a heart attack in 1949 and lived another 20 years. I had a heart attack in 1965 and here I am wasting time on the I-net, 37 years later. You’ll have to read the book. If the inventor of the defibrillator and a coronary physician with forty years of experience gives an opinion for survival today vs. forty years ago, I think I’ll believe him. If you survived a heart attack before heart drugs and DC defibrillators were in wide use, don’t assume that therefore heart attacks must be easily survivable. “If it happened to me, it must be common” is lousy reasoning. Call it the fallacy of taking too small a sample. If you and your dad were in the lucky percentage, how would you ever know how many heart patients DIDN’T survive? And if I win ten thousand bucks at a Vegas slot machine, should I reason that such wins have to be extremely common (since after all it happened to me), and promptly dump my winnings into slot machines? Better not! ---
**Author:** ![Jervoise](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d2c977/32.png) [@Jervoise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jervoise)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 12:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/29 "2002-10-21T12:52:10Z")
**lieu** , do you think you could attach some kind of warning to that picture you linked to? A picture of testicles belonging to a man suffering a serious medical complaint isn’t an entirely pleasant accompaniment to my evening meal. ---
**Author:** ![Mandarax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@Mandarax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mandarax)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/30 "2002-10-21T13:21:40Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Yeah \* > \*\*Talking about nutty patients and emergency departments reminds me of the interesting syndrome of delusional parasitosis. People with DP are convinced that they have parasites. \*\* [What’s up with people who think they’re infested with bugs?](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/000623.html) ---
**Author:** ![Yeah](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/dbc845/32.png) [@Yeah](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yeah)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/31 "2002-10-21T13:32:30Z")
bbleaty, you never answered the question, did Dr. Lown do a study of contemporary medical education or did he just figure “If it happened to me [or at the medical school where I work], it must be common”? And bbleaty, the fact that the defibrillator saves lives and that Dr. Lown is such a brilliant and experienced physician doesn’t change the fact that “heart attacks were not an automatic death sentence in the 60s and before.” Before claiming that Hari Seldon doesn’t know what he is talking about, you should try getting some facts. ---
**Author:** ![lieu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c2a13f/32.png) [@lieu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lieu)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848/32 "2002-10-21T13:51:12Z")
You mean like “Not for the meek”? Sorry Narrad. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-doctors-taught-that-most-of-their-patients-are-nuts/132848.md?page=1)