"Treated with contempt"

I accompanied my mother to her GP appointment to see how the GP would behave towards her. She's had a history of being palmed off by GPs - sometimes when the condition turned out to be life-threatening or painfully debilitating. There has been a pattern of behavior towards my mother whereby they simply assume she's looking for attention and her symptoms are dismissed out of hand, disregarded and ignored. This has occurred with doctors from a number of places and isn't isolated to just this GP.

She's had a persistent fever and chesty cough - for two weeks, so she made an appointment for help. Turns out we should have waited three weeks - which is fair, I have no problem with this. And I also understand that doctors have to be careful when we prescribing antibiotics. I'm also completely ok with this.

But I don't understand why this justifies treating my mum with contempt as if everything she is saying is an affront to the doctor. He treated her like she was a complete idiot. She was asking for help, not judgment. As a comparison, I have never been treated this way by doctors, nor has my dad. There's something about my mother that results in a significant number of doctors to dismiss her before she's even uttered a word.

As I've said, this was just another occurrence of her being treated this way and isn't isolated to just this doctor and GP. But I will say that If you've experienced this kind of condescension and contempt don't expect anything different from this place.

in the future, I'm going to go to all doctor appointments with my mother to make sure she isn't treated this way in the future. All practices need to change the culture of belittlement that plagues what is otherwise an amazing health service.