I have had similar experiences with medical providers because of masks. I changed primary providers in the past year because I had moved. My new doctor’s office required masking for a while. The new doctor herself had an accent and spoke very fast; I was unable to understand much of what she said. These kinds of issues certainly manifest a lack of understanding of and a lack of concern about hearing loss on the part of the general medical community, but I believe your experience, Frances007, manifests an even broader attitude on the part of much of current medical practice: a supercilious attitude of ignoring and dismissing individual patient experience and individual patient concerns overall.

I recently had an egregiously dismissive experience with an ENT provider and his office to the degree that I simply walked away from the practice, because I was treated with such little concern. Next week I have an appointment with a different doctor in the same practice. My visit with her will begin with a recital of my previous experience with her colleague and the pointed question whether I can expect a different level of attention and concern from her. Whether I stay with her will depend on her answer.

I believe we patients are becoming less and less visible to our doctors as thinking, feeling human beings with our own priorities and concerns about our health and wellbeing. We have become reduced to configurations of what doctors see on their computer screens as a result of tests, scales, and calculations. (Next time you visit a medical provider, note how much time they spend looking at you versus their computer. ) Treatments, medications, procedures, etc are prescribed pretty strictly on the basis of pre-set protocols rather than doctors actually seeing us, listening carefully to us, and taking our own particular histories with medical care and our own preferences into consideration. I think this blind, dismissive attitude is particularly acute when we patients are women, are older, or have hearing loss.

I have now made it a priority to seek out only providers who make it clear that as a patient I am seen as a fully functional, fully engaged, reasonably intelligent human being who understands her own health history, knows that today’s medical care - diagnostic procedures, treatments, and medications - is not always necessarily benign and can bring about harm as well as improvement, and has both a right and an obligation to weigh in on and, finally, to decide what happens to her in a doctor’s office, hospital, or treatment setting. I expect it will be an uphill battle.

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