Doctor fears decrease with age; here are some tips anyway

Funny how fear of going to the doctor can decrease with age.

My childhood trips to the doctor were, as I’ve written before, somewhat traumatic … from the doc who thought insulting young overweight patients was the best way to get them to lose weight, to the doc I was literally fooled into going to in order to be treated for a fluid-filled bump inside my lower lip. The latter treated me with a needle after announcing that if the needle didn’t work, he’d have to try, as he pronounced it, the “knoife.” Um, that certainly didn’t help my fear … a fear that at its worst is called iatrophobia, or fear of doctors.

Fast-forward to 1999, when I faced my first major surgery — also shared here at the time — and my first, and only, overnight hospital stay. The longtime problem that necessitated the surgery had reached the point where my desire to feel better had far surpassed that old fear of being “cut open.”

In the years since then I’ve been more and more willing to see my doctors, whom I acknowledge might just know what the heck of which they speak. (You were right, First Opinion Doc, I was indeed eventually going to need that 1999 surgery. And I offer my belated thanks to my primary care physician’s former clinic partner, who showed me that I wasn’t about to succumb to heart disease; I just had acid reflux.)

Not that I now always go to the doctor when I should, mind you. At first, fear was replaced by lack of funds thanks to a health insurance plan choice that involves a high deductible. I eventually opened a much-needed health savings account. But now I have to fool with my reluctance to deal with paperwork, especially per first-time office visits; and what can sometimes be a lengthy wait to see the provider. And with plain old laziness in general.

Men are stereotyped as being the main gender reluctant to go for medical treatment, but my husband

Dre, who was a sickly child, has sometimes had to prompt and prod me to go. He’s also been the one to make sure we both get our annual flu shots, and was insistent that we get every covid shot that came down the pike.

I credit him with our finally, finally, establishing a good relationship with a dentist.

For years, and even after getting dental insurance, I was afraid to see the dentist. As the child of a struggling, then-divorced mom, I recall seeing a dentist only during a single series of cavity-slaying, tooth-filling visits; as I recall being told, the school district footed the bill for it, as it did with my fifth-grade inaugural pair of glasses.

Throughout my adult years, scattered dental visits either gave way to other needs or, unfortunately, reinforced my mental picture of dentists as judgmental beings who got onto/looked down on you if you a) hadn’t been taking the utmost care of your teeth and b) came to them with pre-existing problems. The old coot with whom we last tried to establish a dentist-patient relationship was flat-out mad at Dre and me for bothering him with our oral-health issues. We left him alone and spent a few years tending to our own teeth as best we could before Dre started to remind me that we needed to make another attempt at professional treatment.

I finally placed a timid call to our current dentist, asking if he took new patients. The rest is history. Dr. Edward Sherrill, DDS, totally rocks.

But again, there’s room for doc-seeing improvement. There are several significant medical checkups a gal my age needs. One I haven’t had for a couple of years; another I should’ve first had at age 50 (they now advise having it at age 45, and you can probably guess from that what it is) but haven’t because, well, geesh. “Geesh” being laziness laced with just a dollop of trepidation.

As you’ve probably guessed, I wrote this column to help persuade myself to get over these remaining, self-imposed roadblocks to health maintenance as well as to encourage you, Dear Reader, to get off your own duff and tend to your heath.

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Wandering around online, I found that Healthline.com offers “7 ways to combat doctor’s office anxiety.” The tips, with Talkmistress comments in parentheses:

1. Schedule at a good time of the day or week (i.e., the time of day you feel most “chill”).

2. Take a friend or family member with you (preferably not the hypochondriac in your family).

3. Control your breath (no, they don’t mean swig a bottle of Listerine. They mean control your breathing).

4. Try self-hypnosis (breathing properly, imagining yourself in Tahiti; telling yourself things like, “the doc is less scary than going to the grocery store on Saturday afternoon”).

5. Mentally prepare ahead (meditating and, making positive affirmations — “I will have two dollars to rub together after this visit”).

6. Be honest about your anxiety (“Look, doc, I’m scared of being cut open.”).

7. Have your vitals taken last (a request I plan to make to my PCP’s nurse. My blood pressure always sucks, and being weighed is depressing).

And may all who suffer from iatrophobia be cured of it, despite — like Yours Truly — having learned a cool-sounding big word.