Medicine: What Makes a Good Patient?

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All I want to do is write something like "Right shoulder, 6 months, no trauma" on my chart. Although I lack the heart to tell her, Beatrice would be a better patient if she tried to be a bit more concise. There are lots of Beatrices.

Here's another classic:

"Well, I don't need to have good manners--I'm sick--and I'm not going to be a patsy for some smooth talker in a white coat. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, you know."

That is the mind-set of many patients who abuse their doctors; my bet is they abuse other people as well. Any good doctor knows when you're too sick to be polite and will let it roll off his back. The squeaky wheel we don't like is the one playing a dominance game. That big wheel is likely to get a shorter, less sensitive examination and more tests, and then still more tests to follow up the abnormalities in the first tests, followed by extra consultations with specialists--anything to relieve the doctor's responsibility for a bad patient.

Are doctors good patients? Others may disagree, but I think they are. Medical jargon doesn't faze them, so communication is easier, and their expectations tend to be more reasonable. Anyone in medicine is painfully aware that there are plenty of problems for which we have no good answer. Nurses tend to be even better patients, being adept at following doctors' orders--a virtue lacking in doctors.

Doctors and nurses also know when to respect an educated opinion. When the MRI says one thing and I want to do another, they are more likely to be on my side. But you need not be a medical professional, or educated at all, to be a great patient. It's pretty much the same strain of human decency--a truthful consideration of who the people around you are and of what they are trying to do--that infects a good patient and any good person.

•Dr. Haig has a private practice in the New York City area and writes a column for time.com