Dear LPG,

I want to talk about something that has been mentioned to me twice during recent occasions when visiting my GP.

 I have found that as I have become older I spend more time visiting my doctor which, as I am sure, is a discovery that we all make as time goes by, but I am wondering if my fellow elders also find that when you actually get to the consultation room the experience there can be anything but reassuring.

I think that it is really annoying to be told that I must expect all the symptoms that I am experiencing simply because I am old.  It takes so long to see your GP these days that it is an insult for your conversation with them to include the hint that you are lucky to still be alive. 

While I agree that as we get older it is expected that many of us have to learn to live with ongoing complaints and other conditions such as pain, but any doctor who pulls the ‘age card’ on a patient should be called out for their bad attitude.  After all we are all lucky to be alive regardless of our age.

In these days of doctors’ appointments, which you often have to queue up to make, before waiting for days to actually realise after it is booked; where you are expected to hurry in and out of the consultation and where all too often the doctor spends half the time reading your notes, because he or she doesn’t know anything about your medical history and has never seen you before, it is insulting to be told the obvious so often.

I understand that when we elders walk into that surgery our illness is often due to our age, but I am sure bedside manner still counts. I would ask the patients who are confronted with a doctor who makes some witty but unnecessary remark about an older patient’s need to accept what is happening because of their age, to remind their doctor that it is their right to have the best medical treatment possible in spite of their age having paid so much for it during their long lifetime. 

DM,  Catford.