Comment by pyuser583
1 month ago
I feel very uncomfortable trying to talk my doctor into doing something they don't recommend. I know too many people who buy into fake medical stuff.
Why is this different? Why is pestering a doctor to give me a medicine they don't recommend a good idea?
Your own doctor is as likely to be a quack/have quack-like beliefs as you are. Unironically this is true! Better learn to start reading Pubmed!
Doctors/medical associations don't agree with each other on much, even at the very highest levels. For example, the USA and EU have totally different recommendations related to digital rectal exams for aging men. One believes that finding cancer in old men is important, the other claims it's bad because most of those cancers are benign and sticking a finger up an old mans butt often causes its own complications.
Doctors don't have the time or capacity to know their patients well enough to make personalized recommendations in most cases. If you show up with symptoms of X they can recommend Y and will probably ask you whether you have Z which can impact the treatment. But virtually no doctor is going to ring you up proactively and say "hey, I noticed you haven't had a HPV vaccine yet, and I think it might make sense for you because I know this and that about your risk profile".
Doctors are not all knowing, infallible oracles. They are human beings you can have a conversation with about your health. If you think something makes sense for you, you can run it past them. No one is suggesting randomly asking doctors to prescribe random shit.
Because doctors are human and fallible operating in suboptimal systems. Don't want to provide me with a low risk, potentially high reward, low cost intervention? I'll shop until I find a doctor who will, or source it myself. Suboptimal systems and practitioners of various quality require advocating for one's self. I had to twist Planned Parenthood's arm to get Gardasil before it was approved for older adults, even though I was paying cash out of pocket, but had no problem with a trusted PCP providing me Metformin, GLP-1 prescriptions, etc simply by arguing my case and meeting sufficient criteria it would not come back to bite them.
The doctor likely didn't recommend it because GP is 40 years old. Most people's sex lives is comparatively... boring at that age.
The bigger issue is that someone who is 40 has likely already been exposed. I know women who had to ask to get it in their late 20's, and only succeeded after convincing the doctor they had been celibate up to that point. Apparently such a thing is relatively rare.
In either case this neither means that they are now immune against that specific strain, nor that they can't or won't get infected by another. Therefore that reasoning is flawed.
Yeah that’s the way I take it - “you’re probably not going to convince many people to sleep with you.”
Kind of hurts my pride, but seeing as I'm older than 40, and my wife and I are pretty freaking boring, the vaccine is better spent on someone with more opportunities ahead of them.
I really hate these vaccine specific awareness campaigns. Not only do they hurt my vanity, but I know too many people who are anti-vaxers, or into weird fake medicines.
I just go with what my doctor says. If social media says something different, social media is wrong.
But really, don’t get your vaccine schedule from Hacker News.
The activists on these threads should probably be pushing folks to get their kids vaccinated.
You need to be your own advocate.
I am believe me. And I’m always told the same thing by different doctors. So that’s that.
Even when I live in Europe, which I do occasionally, I’m told to follow the vaccine schedule of my home country.
My kids have all received all recommended vaccines, including the one discussed. So I’m not in any way opposed.
It’s just not appropriate to go around vaccines not recommended.