Malingering Patients

It is a beautiful day today, the weekend is here, and the month of February is running fast. Interestingly today a major part of Ghana suddenly experienced harmattan like what happens naturally in January and we are all wondering what happened to bring this back.

Some people are attributing it to too much love expressed on Valentine's day but well that's all for fun, but I do hope you are doing well and having a good time? Also, I hope you are ready for the weekend, do not forget to spend quality time with family, friends, and loved ones, and remember to always have fun in moderation whiles taking good care of your health.

Today I want to talk about a particular group of patients that health practitioners experience or meet every now and why we ought to stop such habits and avoid being in this group of people altogether for both our good and the betterment of those who take care of our health too. I do hope you enjoy the read as usual.

As a health personnel, I believe that we as individuals know ourselves better than any health personnel can and so I personally make the effort to get as much from the patient as I can before I add my knowledge and experiences from over the years to the diagnosis, differentials, treatment plans, referrals, etc.

However it gets sad when patients try to play their care providers, sometimes I wonder if these individuals believe they are too smart to outsmart the person they came to seek help from or if they just want to test our competence. It is not a good thing to lie to your doctor about whatever could be going on with you but even worse is your trying to play them.

Most often than not healthcare providers have more on their plate than you can imagine, you are probably not the only patient on the waiting list and yet still we seek to give you the very best of care and ensure that we are doing right by every single patient that walks into our consulting room, we have the oath to uphold after all.

And then you get these patients that fall within the category of malingering coming and cooking up complaints, lies, and a whole lot geared towards whatever outcome they want because they are either looking for a particular kind of drug to be administered or prescribed to them or they want to obtain something. Whatever reason it may be that you decide to lie or malinger to your doctor, it is not cool, it is a no-no and a habit we ought not to practice. Desist from it.

To malinger is to pretend basically and I can tell you from experience that hardly would you be able to outsmart your healthcare provider in that way, pretending to be ill or pretending that something is wrong with you when it is not would get you into trouble most of the time because you may either end up with the wrong diagnosis, wrong treatment or be caught and sent off.

The latter is more likely and it is what happens in most cases. This category of patients exists in all aspects of healthcare including the eye care industry where I find myself. Normally, we see it and just let it go however I feel like sharing it here would be of great benefit to my readers as well as those they share it with.

When you seek something in particular whether it be a service or aid in any way from your doctor speak to them, be honest about it, and whichever situation you find yourself in. If they can help you they would gladly help you, if they can't they can refer you or point you to someone who can, we are sworn to protect and save lives and sight after all.

And so it would be better to come to your Optometrist and tell him or her that you do not have any complaints about your eye, and you feel fine but then you would want them to take a look at it for you to ensure all is well, is called checkup, then if you perhaps want some fashionable lenses to walk about in the sun for protection or perhaps something nice with protective coatings to use at work for the laptop, you tell him or her.

It is not anything that is too out of the ordinary for us to do for you, we actually recommend it generally to our patients so that's absolutely nothing to worry about, but once a day I get patients both young and old coming in and faking to have refractive errors. I do not know how they believe they can deceive the Optometrist into prescribing lenses for them when their vision is actually fine.

If you have been following my blog for while, I previously discussed what we call objective refraction where with the aid of the autorefraction machine or the retinoscope we can automatically estimate the power of the eye in terms of refraction, what your eyes may need to be able to see far when rays are coming from infinity. Now if your eyes are fine we can easily tell because the power would come off empty or Plano or having something dismissible.

Once we get these results we can conclude that you are lying and then there are other ways we can easily get you without you even realizing it, it is our craft after all, and years of experience teach us a whole lot. A lot of times these individuals that do this just want to wear spectacles and could have just asked for them instead of putting themselves and their doctors through unnecessary stress which eventually ends with us catching up with their pretense.

This is more common in rural areas and amongst teenagers, because they believe that if their parents who are funding their care find out that their eyes are absolutely fine they would want them to have those fancy lenses they are yearning for to show off to their friends and colleagues in school. If only they knew that lying to get a particular prescription could also have repercussions on their vision.

If you do not need lenses to see and you wear say minus lenses, it automatically makes you a hyperope and because you are young accommodation would come into play to keep your vision going, the downside is you will end up with lots of headaches and pain in the end. Cylindrical lenses would distort your vision if you do not need them and plus lenses would just make you short-sighted if you do not need them.

And so my advice to you dear reader is to not fall within this class of individuals, which is why I always say when in doubt speak to a professional, it includes letting your doctor know your wants and needs and what you believe they can do to help you or make things better for you. There's nothing wrong with suggesting something to your doctor and it is only an arrogant person who would snub you off completely if you do not.

And so Make that effort to be better for yourself as well as make the work easier for your healthcare provider. Learn to be truthful when it comes to your health, it may save your life, do not keep information from your Healthcare provider, we are sworn to secrecy and wouldn't take your information out, that information could literally be the breakthrough for your diagnosis. I do hope that this write-up speaks to someone out there today to be a better patient for all our sakes. It was a pleasure serving today and I wish you a blissful weekend.