Doctors with god complexes are the worst. Since I've just moved back to this area, I had to deal with a new ortho when oldest was hospitalized a few weeks ago. I originally went to one hospital because I thought the ortho they'd seen when they were little had retired (he hadn't, but isn't seeing new patients.) Anyway, this new guy was awful. It was his way or the highway. At some point the discussion turned to my youngest son and he made some statements as though his word was law without even knowing the whole story. I looked at him nearly slack-jawed, told him that I no longer felt he could competently care for my children and walked out of the appointment.
We were just condescended to by my son's pediatric GI doctor. He managed to insult: 1) His colleague, the allergist; 2) His nurses and staff; 3) Mrs.k2002, an RN, basically saying the he and only he knew anything about this particular issue. He then went on to tell us that we were very unusual in the amount of dairy that we have in our diet. He wanted my son to go dairy free and we explained that, unless there was an extremely strong reason to do so, we weren't going to comply. Although dairy is often implicated in the issue we are dealing with, it's not definitive and there weren't enough indicators (to us) to justify a change like that. The doctor (actually an osteopath, not an MD) told us that he and the people he knows didn't eat that much dairy and had no problem giving it up. The fact that he's a member of an ethnic group that is 90-100% lactose intolerant wouldn't have anything to with that one. [/sarcasm]
We're looking for a second opinion. He's far too invested in Z's problem being this particular syndrome.
Among the other things he did was to be very reluctant to tell us the quantitative value for a particular marker, claiming that it wasn't a definitive value. Except that every research paper abstract I read (and I spent a lot of time on PubMed) mentioned this particular threshold in the diagnosis. The pathologists report said "a few" and "some," and that, apparently, was good enough for him. Not good enough for me, I'm afraid.