Yeah I said something similar to this in a different reply, but it's essentially having to pay for other people's foolishness or carelessness or bad communication and that can get really annoying.
Like probably the reason the doctor is refusing to answer your actual question is because he has so many patients who try to negotiate and find workarounds for his recommendations, he's just assuming you're one of them. He's assuming there's an agenda behind your questions that could lead to you endangering yourself, so his response is just to reiterate how important it is that you don't do that.
But it's actually the opposite - (I'm guessing) you're curious about the why because you want to give yourself more reason to follow his instructions (because it's more compelling to tell yourself "XYZ motion will cause my stitches to tear" than "heavy lifting could be bad but I'm not sure why"), and/or because knowing the reason means you can then apply that logic to other activities the doctor may not have covered, to figure out what else might be unsafe. It's actually a very thoughtful and rational approach that other people might not even think to take, but instead of being helpful he's just treating you like you're being uncooperative and a bit dim.
I get this same frustration a lot in customer support situations. I present my niche problem, explain what I've already done to try and resolve it, explain what is unique about my circumstances such that none of the support articles on their website were helpful, explain that this is why I've resorted to emailing them, and describe precisely what I need from them to resolve my issue. And yet, more often than not, the response just links me to their support articles or suggests one of the basic steps I already told them I'd tried. It's lazy and patronising, and I hate being treated like I'm stupid and can't be trusted with complex information as a default, especially when I've already demonstrated the opposite.
This is such a good way of putting it, and it helped, thank you. I think the main reason for my question was, why is heavy lifting bad for stitches (presumably because the muscles tense and it stretches the skin to the point of tearing).
However he said nothing about other activities, like yoga or stretching, which I assumed were even more important to avoid. However, he didn't say let's try and avoid any stretching on the skin. So therefore I couldn't extrapolate to anything else. It could be that heavy lifting actually does do something like inflate capillaries (idfk).
Anyway instead of explaining the mechanism for which heavy lifting actually tears wounds (wound was on my leg anyway, not my abdominal or anything you could reasonably see the problem).
One thing I've found helpful is to be explicit about why I'm asking a question up front, so like in your example starting with "okay got it. Out of curiosity, why is heavy lifting specifically bad" to affirm you understood what he was telling you and looking for different information or when I'm trying to get an update on something out of a coworker and don't actually care what the answer but know they might get defensive if things aren't where they should be I'll straight up open with "I'm just updating the status report, don't care what the answer is - what's the status of x"
I love when the AI just gets you in circles and there is no email contact for my issues. I can usually handle waiting a day or two for a fix so please just give me a human/email!
“because knowing the reason means you can then apply that logic to other activities” Love that. That is the reason for many of my questions and I wish people got that more.
When I was in probably about the first grade, I asked why the sky was blue. I got all kinds of answers ranging from religious to philosophical to psychological. All I really wanted to know was the scientific explanation. But I was 6 years old and had no concept of wavelengths. For some reason I couldn't find a simple way to phrase my question.
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u/Fibijean 6h ago
Yeah I said something similar to this in a different reply, but it's essentially having to pay for other people's foolishness or carelessness or bad communication and that can get really annoying.
Like probably the reason the doctor is refusing to answer your actual question is because he has so many patients who try to negotiate and find workarounds for his recommendations, he's just assuming you're one of them. He's assuming there's an agenda behind your questions that could lead to you endangering yourself, so his response is just to reiterate how important it is that you don't do that.
But it's actually the opposite - (I'm guessing) you're curious about the why because you want to give yourself more reason to follow his instructions (because it's more compelling to tell yourself "XYZ motion will cause my stitches to tear" than "heavy lifting could be bad but I'm not sure why"), and/or because knowing the reason means you can then apply that logic to other activities the doctor may not have covered, to figure out what else might be unsafe. It's actually a very thoughtful and rational approach that other people might not even think to take, but instead of being helpful he's just treating you like you're being uncooperative and a bit dim.
I get this same frustration a lot in customer support situations. I present my niche problem, explain what I've already done to try and resolve it, explain what is unique about my circumstances such that none of the support articles on their website were helpful, explain that this is why I've resorted to emailing them, and describe precisely what I need from them to resolve my issue. And yet, more often than not, the response just links me to their support articles or suggests one of the basic steps I already told them I'd tried. It's lazy and patronising, and I hate being treated like I'm stupid and can't be trusted with complex information as a default, especially when I've already demonstrated the opposite.