With hypochondriasis rampant today, how do ordinary people find "effective medical treatment"?

Why does a doctor ask about a sexual history when it's just a bad stomach?

Why did the doctor continue to press until we squealed when our stomach was already hurting?

Also, why do doctors always squeeze the head of the stethoscope in their hands before auscultation, and then tell us to curl our legs before pressing our stomachs?

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Following the 2021 medical science "Patient's Family, Please Come", Wang Xing, a doctor of oncology at Peking University and an attending physician of thoracic surgery at Shanghai First People's Hospital, will present his new book "Doctor, What Are You Thinking" in June this year.

If he wrote "Patient Families, Please Come" for the families of cancer patients, "Doctor, What are You Thinking" wants to encourage the whole society to learn medicine. With the new book, Wang hopes to help readers construct medical thinking, reduce the cost of communication between doctors and patients, and make medical treatment more effective.

An hour in line, three minutes to see a doctor?

In life, many patients are not satisfied with the outpatient doctor: "cherish the word such as gold ah, speak two sentences under the 'order to leave'."

Wang understands the patient's feelings. In his junior year, he went to see a doctor for a foot injury. The result was that the doctor did not examine him carefully, nor did he examine him properly, so he ended his visit by saying "nothing". The encounter had puzzled him.

But when Wang became a doctor himself, he realized that more of an outpatient's job was to quickly determine whether a patient was sick or not, whether to take medicine or operate, whether to stay in the hospital -- simply, "screening."

"Under the current system, clinics are not designed to make everyone happy and satisfied. For most outpatient physicians, time is spent identifying problems rather than providing emotional value." Wang told Thepaper.cn that in the book, he also thought about whether future doctors could optimize outpatient procedures to improve communication and understanding between doctors and patients.

Health care consumption, more is better?

Recalling the visit in his junior year, Wang Xing recovered quickly without any medicine and didn't waste any money.

"From this point of view, the doctor did his job to a high standard. I don't want to say doctors should be apathetic, but at least it cleared my mind of years of doubts and allowed me to think about 'effective medicine' from a physician's perspective."

Wang told Thepaper.cn that many treatments in society are ineffective, such as the use of health care drugs, and the anxiety caused by the Internet boom has also resulted in excessive medical treatment. "For example, we have many nodules, lung nodules, thyroid nodules, breast nodules... Many people choose surgery right away, but in most cases it's just observation and no medicine."

He thinks of the United States and Japan, which are exactly opposite models of health care. The United States tends to avoid spending on patients, while the Japanese try to do as much as possible. "Almost everyone can understand that you get what you pay for, but there is only one thing that they can't understand: life. No country, no organization, no model is perfect when it comes to health care, but reflection can make all of us, including doctors and patients, calm down and think about where we can look for 'effective care' instead of 'expensive care,' 'wasteful care,' and 'hypocritical care.'"

Anxiety can be more damaging than the disease itself

In the face of illness, many young people are beginning to "pre-anxiety".

As a medical student, Wang Xing also experienced "medical student syndrome" : when he brushed his teeth and bled, he thought he was leukemia; Often constipated, he thought he was bowel cancer; When he learned hyperthyroidism, he felt that it suited his impatience.

"Having experienced it myself, I understand the anxiety about illness. There are a number of things we can do to rule out the disease when symptoms appear, but we need to be careful not to get into a dead-end situation where we can't stand it if we don't find out." Wang said patients' anxiety over the disease may cause more physical harm than the disease itself.

That's one of the reasons he wrote What Were You Thinking, Doctor? He hopes the book will allow the public to understand how doctors inquire, examine and make diagnoses, as well as to feel the way doctors think and learn to think like them. "Medical thinking is the shortest distance between ordinary people and doctors. Once ordinary people have more understanding of this way of thinking, panic and anxiety will be reduced and replaced by rational analysis and decision-making to achieve 'effective medicine'."