As a cancer patient I felt dismissed by doctors. As a doctor, I am desperate for the system to change

When Ben Bravery began studying medicine after surviving bowel cancer he found something missing from the curriculum – patients

His diagnosis feels unfair. He wants to be studying music, sending pictures to friends, falling in love. Instead, he is in hospital having his treatment for a chronic disease optimised while doctors, me included, monitor him for medication side-effects.I know this feeling. I was diagnosed with bowel cancer in my 20s. I had no family history and, apart from cancer, was otherwise fit and healthy. I was building a business in Beijing and was in a new relationship.

Being sick is scary. I wanted my doctors to ask me how I was feeling, but they mostly didn’t. At my lowest, I wondered if their inattentiveness was in fact indifference. From time to time, a doctor will get sick and then write about having their view of medicine altered. They find themselves in a hospital bed, maybe in a busy emergency department, alone and confused. And they suddenly feel what their patients feel. Now, they declare, they want to be a different kind of doctor.

When I read the first-hand epiphanies of doctors I think of their patients. The patients whose illness experience they may have dismissed. The families who waited hours to have a doctor rush in for a few minutes and then leave. The patient who complained about pain, only to have a doctor roll their eyes.

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