My Doctor’s Appointments Feel Like Little Vacations:
Why Medical Care Has a Holiday Vibe
By David Bereby
The U.S. health care system, overall, is a toxic mess. But my personal experiences with it have been largely positive. I have a good doctor with a friendly staff, and the specialists I’ve had to see have all been great. When I travel through the medical labyrinth, I experience actual care. And am reminded why this experience is so valuable, and why its opposite — feeling that others are indifferent — is so harmful.
Typical for my gender and generation, I’d avoided doctors and doctory thoughts for decades. but I’ve now reached the age where that sort of minimal contact doesn’t work. I have to repair and maintain various bits of my personal infrastructure, on the regular. So in the past few weeks, I’ve had a bunch of medical appointments of the relatively pleasant sort — the kind where there is work to do, but nothing truly frightening or life-altering.
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These visits have a template: Intake, with someone quick and competent at plugging you into the system. Then, interview and measurement, performed by a physician assistant or nurse practitioner, who’s conversational enough to reassure and technical enough to record the stats (blood pressure, weight and the like). Then comes the apex auditor — his or her majesty the doctor. There is examination, consideration, maybe some other testing, then explanation and solution, and reassurance.
A few years ago, during my first experience of multiple appointments of this sort, I was surprised to find that I wasn’t stressed out by them. On the contrary: My mind would swing into a sort of holiday spirit.
My day-to-day grind suspended (for that ironclad, unassailable reason, *a doctor’s appointment*) I’d feel relaxed and safe, and temporarily free of run-of-the-mill worries. My walks back from the doctor’s office were meditative and relaxed, as I looked at life from a grander perspective. I was in the afternoon-off mindset that says “I should do more volunteer work, check out that Buddhist art exhibit, and maybe learn to play the saxophone.”
And so for the first time in my life I could understand how people — especially people for whom the world’s message is, “no one cares about you” — could fall into hypochondria or Munchausen syndrome. A decent medical appointment, where you’re politely ushered around, listened to, responded to, feels like a short vacation.
In fact, it can feel more like a vacation than the trips that bear that name. After all, those often revolve around others’ needs — what the children enjoy, what the frail elders require. They demand work and stress, accompanied by the meta-stress of absurdity. After all, there is something ridiculous about stress-for-leisure, when we apply skills honed for work to an inherently frivolous purpose. Did I really just raise my voice and make vague threats because we didn’t get a table on the patio? Did I just apply all my research and organizing prowess to make sure a bunch of people in bathing suits rush in a panic to make the relaxing twilight cruise?
There are no such moments of absurdity in medical matters. If you’re there, it’s unquestionably important. It’s about your health!
Researchers have found more “health anxiety” among people who have less social status and less money. People lower socioeconomic status have plenty of practical reasons to worry about their health. But I wonder if some “health anxiety” among less privileged people is a yearning for real care. I think many people yearn for the peace and comfort of a good doctor visit — so much so that they’ll invent reasons to seek one.
And so you present yourself before a competent and caring doctor, and you feel better even before the exam begins. It ought to be everyone’s birthright. Instead, it’s a privilege some have and many don’t.
David Bereby is an author from Brooklyn, New York. He frequently writes about science, especially science that touches on human behavior.
After decades writing about identity and conflict, he has shifted his focus “to write more about how people relate to technology, and to one another through technology.” His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Nature, Smithsonian, Aeon, Nautilus, The New Republic and many other publications. My book, “Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind” was published by Little, Brown in 2005 and in paperback (with a new subtitle, “The Science of Identity”) by the University of Chicago Press in 2008.
His newsletter about robotics in people’s lives, “Robots for the Rest of Us,” is on Substack.