But here’s a conversation I wish I never clicked into: How do you deal with chronic pain patients who, when given pain management options beyond medication, accuse you of gaslighting? Sounds tame enough, right? At a quick glance, a lot of the conversations are what you’d expect – asking questions about patient cases (with de-identified details), exchanging links to studies and recent research, trading war room stories about internships and fellowships. r/medicine is a virtual lounge for physicians and other medical professionals from around the world to talk about the latest advances, controversies, ask questions of each other, have a laugh, or share a difficult moment.

But if you’re a “perennial patient” like me, I am here to warn you about a subreddit out there for medical professionals with a whopping 386,000 members. But most of all, it comes from bad experiences: in exam rooms, in hospitals, in MRI machines.Īnd in these days of people having no filter on the internet, you can find message boards on just about any topic – niche fetishes, quirky hobbies, neighborhood gossip mills. It comes from decades of being juggled between specialists like a hot bag of microwave popcorn, being put through brutal batteries of tests that ultimately route to dead ends, and fighting countless insurance claims through clenched teeth. I have a moderate distrust of the health care system (and I bet, if this headline caught your eye, you do too).

Reddit lost soul aside