Another guy checking in with the “When I get tired enough of hearing my wife nag” answer.
The last time I went to the doctor (about 18 months ago), I ended up getting an emergency referral to the hospital for what turned out to be appendicitis.
I’ve also had an itchy rash on my leg for about six months now, which I still haven’t got round to booking an appointment for.
…so yeah, it takes quite a bit to get me to the doctor. :o
I do, however, visit the dentist and optician regularly (six months for the dentist, 2 years for the optician).
I have to be close to death, or at least think I am.
I respect professionals. I’m an IT professional and I wouldn’t want someone making choices on their own regarding the company’s data if they were getting warning signs (server error messages) and decided to ignore them until they felt in their untrained opinion it got serious.
The doctor gets paid when you make an office visit. So there is no reason not to go there. They are getting paid for their time, they never say “You wasted my time with this.” This isn’t your overworked middle school teacher who doesn’t want to spend time helping you with a math problem because they feel you day dreamed in class. The doctor is in business. I also have a lot of clients who are in the medical profession, and it’s a shame not to take advantage of this great resource.
People have to get over being concerned what others think when they need help. To become a doctor, you have to do well in high school to get accepted to a good college. Take on debt in many cases. Then do great in college to get accepted into medical school. But it doesn’t end there, you have to do great in medical school, have a residency and be good enough to get a fellowship. Still while taking on more debt too for many. Then you get out and practice. Often you get called in the middle of the night and they are trained for this and have to be at their best and brightest for you. After all that, you are going to sit around and be sick and worry, and make your family members, friends and co-workers worry because you won’t pick up the phone and call the doctor’s office.
There are articles about men’s health, and to be honest, it’s pretty stupid how men won’t go to the doctor. I guess all that physical education in school and the loser coach telling you to tough it out and walk it off was your training for health for life.
I go by three rules:
If I’ve been sick for 3 days or more - go see the doctor
If I have a fever over 102 - go see the doctor
If something hurts too bad to walk/sit/sleep, etc. - go see the doctor
::Looks at user name::
Why am I not surprised? 
I go when I’m near, or two days past death. Luckily the latter condition hasn’t come up yet.
Being relatively healthy means any visit I’m going to pay 100% for as I never meet my annual deductible.
Well…when I was in the twilight of impending adulthood, living at home while going to college and under my step-mother’s insurance I developed this dry, persistent cough. It went on for several weeks, until my step-mother finally demanded I go see her doctor, especially as one of my step-brothers had just had a really nasty upper respiratory ailment. Her doc was a very highly regarded internal medicine who had saved her life when she had peritonitis. As luck would have it that day my months-long cough largely dried up, but as I was already scheduled I went in, not knowing if it would come back. We had a nice chat about bacterial and viral infections, during which he made a real attempt not to be condescending.
Afterwards as he walked out of the office down the hall, I’m sure thinking he was out of earshot, I heard him muttering disgustedly to a nurse coming to take my vitals “I don’t know why this kid is even here”. Made me feel like utter shit for wasting his time :D. I gotta figure stuff like that ( apparently healthy enough patients frustrating doctors who have better things to do ) goes on all the time. Ever since then I’ve tended to try and be an anti-hypochondriac, occasionally to my regret.
When I have something that I know will not go away on its own, or I can’t handle myself.
Like this:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=702126&highlight=splinter
Didn’t realize that happened almost two years ago.
To be fair, no one ever has. But they can sure look at you asspants and make you feel like a big crybaby. I switched doctors because of this, going to one who was more accustomed to seeing older people. She says I’m one of her youngest patients!
It’s the expense, hassle, and incompetence that keeps me away, not a desire to “tough it out”.
Seriously, I’m supposed to take a $5000 bus ride to the place where all the deadliest and most contagious diseases congregate, get herded like a cow through the most Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare since Jacob’s Ladder, wait hours reading old magazines and being scowled at by grumpy nurses while babies scream in my ear, spend another $20k on the services of a golfer who paid too much for a piece of paper giving him the exclusive right to diagnose my body’s failures after 30 seconds of staring into my mouth and listening to my heartbeat? If I’m literally dying, maybe it would be worth it to see a doctor or visit a hospital. Maybe.
I could get a masters degree for the price of an hour of some doctor’s time. Who isn’t even as good as he thinks he is. And I’ve seen doctors give people strokes or kill them from incompetence. So it isn’t even like “well, if I had the money I’d go…”. No, there’s a real risk of death any time you’re near one of these expensive bastards! 95% of the time, you’ll get better anyway, 4% of the time, the doctor will make things worse, and 1% of the time, they’ll fix you but of course it will take as much effort as Basic Training, require navigating a labyrinth of byzantine processes and obscure forms, and cost as much as your house. And you’ll still die eventually anyway.
I go when I have something that undeniably needs sewn up, cut out, put in a cast, or a prescription pill to manage it.
This is your surrogate Jewish mother speaking 
The last time I was wondering whether I should worry about the annoying slight sore spot behind my knee, especially since I had gone to the doctor 2 days before for what had already been confirmed as ringworm by an overseas pharmacist (but hadn’t cleared up yet, so I needed stronger drugs), I went anyway. It turned out to be a blood clot (actually 2 of them, one of which was in a somewhat worrisome spot). I never would have thought to have it checked out, except something similar had happened after leg surgery in 1996, and I had just been on some really long plane flights, which I knew were a risk factor (to Cyprus and back - man, that 11-hour nonstop to Istanbul is a killer. Luckily not literally - this time.)
You’re not a hypochondriac, so don’t let your doc make you feel like one.
Started getting an annual check-up every year at 55 (62 now, so far, so good) and see the dentist every year and the eye doctor every other year.
Only other time I see a doctor normally is when something hurts too bad to sleep (broken foot, gallstones, and scratched cornea). I found that this year I will, if sick enough to miss work for two days straight, go see a doctor (he found bronchitis but for a short while they thought it might be pnuemonia).
They are bugging me about doing a stress test and another (had one at 55) endoscopy.
Doing my best to ignore them.
Now that I’ve passed the big five-oh, every time I see my doctor, he says, “When do you want to schedule your colonoscopy?”
Nice open ended question! Yeah, yeah, I know I should do it. But I don’t wanna!
This shows up on Facebook, etc. all the time. I know it’s not Photoshopped, because I drove by that billboard many, many times. 
SFW.
Routinely for eyes and teeth. My rule of thumb is, “When I don’t know WTF I have,” or else, “I know what I have, if X wasn’t a prescription drug.”
And bones snapping. Those will send me into the ER in a minute.
Or I’m sick or injured enough to justify this, which fortunately hasn’t ever happened to me.
I don’t know what to think with medicine anymore. Some doctors say ‘you’re fine’ even if you have something seriously wrong and some act like every minor issue is life threatening. I don’t have the education to know any better myself.
Although it never gets reported in any statistics, side effects of medical care are the third leading cause of death (behind heart disease and cancer). Drug side effects, doctor mistakes, hospital acquired diseases, etc. It adds up.
Plus the fact that you can go to a hospital and spend a day and walk out with an $80,000 bill that your insurance my choose not to cover either in full or in part is also part of my fear. If I lived in Canada or any other wealthy country I probably wouldn’t fear the doctor ‘as’ much. Personally I think I’d rather die and leave an inheritance to my loved ones than spend all my money on overpriced health care.
I hadn’t been for over ten years because I knew she’d nag me about having a pap smear and mammogram. I didn’t want the pap smear because I had a uterine prolapse and it was gross. So none of my other medical issues got addressed either (including a cough which I’d had for > two years.)
Had some unexplained pv bleeding which forced me to go. Had the surgery, had the mammogram, had the pap smear. Fixed the cough. Fixed the hypertension. I think I made up for my lack of medical attention in about six weeks’ worth of visits, hospitalisation etc etc.
I hate going to the doctor as well, just in case that wasn’t obvious from my first sentence but I’ll force myself to go at least yearly now. Just because I’m 62 this year and I need to grow up and deal with it.
Let’s see…I was pregnant in 2010, so I saw a Certified Nurse Midwife, and then my pregnancy went sideways, so I saw quite a few doctors in the hospital. Then I started nursing school and needed a TB test and some vaccines and a physical, so I saw a GP, who also made me go for a mammogram and a PAP…
Then I lost my insurance for a while and was on the Don’t Get Sick Health Plan. In 2014, I got insurance again and my work made me see a PCP for an overall well check and a whole bunch of labs.
Then, a few months ago, I went to Urgent Care with what turned out to be Influenza, because I was scared I needed hospitalization for maybe pneumonia. The NP gave me Tessalon Perles and Codeine cough syrup. Can’t say the cough syrup did much, but Tessalon Perles are magic.
My deductible is $2000, so I’m still on the Don’t Get Sick Health Plan. It’s cheaper for me to go to Urgent Care and pay out of pocket than it is to see my PCP if I’m sick. Plus, I just generally don’t like going to doctors. (Yes, I’m a nurse. That’s why I don’t like going to doctors.) And most things go away on their own or with herbal home treatment. So I have to be concerned that I need hospitalization to see a doctor or nurse practitioner.
Nah, they won’t think you’re a hypochondriac. Or if they do, they’re idiots and you should ask for a referral to a cardiologist. What you describe (chest pain with exercise but normal coronary arteries) sounds like Cardiac Syndrome X. The good news is that people with Cardiac Syndrome X don’t have any greater risk for cardiovascular events than other healthy people. Statin drugs, as well as some other drugs, have sometimes been found useful at relieving the symptoms, but nothing works well for everyone, so if you do decide to pursue treatment, make sure that you and your doctor agree on a trial length and switch to something else if it isn’t working. Also, since the same drugs are often given to people with lifelong actual heart problems, make sure that all your other doctors know that you’re on [whatever it is] for symptom relief of Syndrome X, not for high blood pressure, so it’s okay to discontinue that drug if they need to. Doctors are terrified to discontinue another doctor’s heart meds.