She Dressed Up So Her Doctor Would Take Her Seriously

A podcast guest told me she dressed up for the appointment. Not because she wanted to make a good impression in the way you might before a job interview. Because she had learned that if the doctor liked how she looked, he might actually take her seriously.

I’ve been collecting stories like this for a long time through thousands of qualitative research interviews, through my podcast where women share what it’s really like to navigate their own diagnoses, and through years of sitting across from patients who have been trying to find the right words to explain what went wrong in an exam room where they were supposed to feel safe. What strikes me most is how patients adapt. People figure out how to manage around a system that isn’t fully meeting their needs and they do it so quietly that the system never has to reckon with it.

Early in my healthcare career when the marketing team produced actual printed quarterly magazines, this would never be the kind of topic that would be featured in the publication. The articles highlighted new “rockstar” physicians, shiny new medical equipment, new procedures and “quality care, close to home.” We didn’t talk about this communication issue around why patients feel dismissed and why the healthcare system needed to do a better job at diagnostic medicine to mitigate the downstream burden on the system of an undiagnosed, misdiagnosed or late diagnosed patients. These were not the “sexy” topics that made the cut.

One guest on my podcast described learning to “Google responsibly.” She didn’t mean she was being careful about the quality of the sources she was consulting. She meant she had to be strategic about what she brought to her physician so he wouldn’t dismiss her. The fact that a patient has internalized that level of self-editing just to be taken seriously in a medical appointment is, to me, one of the most telling signals of where trust has broken down.

Patients aren’t asking for miracles. They want to be believed. They want a doctor who can say I don’t know without it feeling like a door closing.

What the data isn’t capturing

Most health systems are measuring patient satisfaction in ways that do not always tell the full picture. Think about how likely you are to take the time to complete any survey for any services you might consume. More likely than not, you would take the time to express dissatisfaction. Some grateful patients may actually take the time to commend the hospital on a satisfactory experience.

However, what those measurements don’t capture is the quieter exit such as the patient who doesn’t complain, doesn’t fill out the survey with anything alarming, and simply doesn’t come back. Or the one who does come back but has stopped being honest about what’s going on because she’s learned it won’t change anything.

And if patients are not completing your surveys, they are discussing their experiences in the places most organizations are not looking. It’s in the comments section of a social media video. It’s in what patients say to each other in waiting rooms and in online communities and on the drive home. I wrote about some of what I’ve found in those spaces for The Wharton Healthcare Quarterly, and even that piece only got at part of it.

Both sides of the bedside

What I hear from patients consistently is that they want three things. They want to be believed. They want a collaborative relationship, not a transaction. And they want clear follow-up, someone to tell them what happens next, even when what happens next is “I’m not sure, but here’s how we find out.”

When a doctor says I don’t know and then does nothing with that admission, patients don’t feel reassured by the honesty. They go home and start researching because what else are they supposed to do?

And that’s where it gets complicated, because physicians have real constraints. Time is finite. Appointments are short. A patient who arrives underprepared with a sprawling, unorganized account of her symptoms is genuinely harder to help in the time available. The breakdown isn’t always about dismissiveness. Sometimes it’s about two people trying to communicate across a system that wasn’t designed to make that easy.

That’s why I talk about advocacy from both sides of the bedside. Patients have a role in coming prepared, prioritizing their concerns, being transparent about what they’re taking and why. But hospital systems have a much larger role in creating the conditions where that kind of honest exchange is actually possible. And that work starts with leadership.

What this means for your organization

When patients feel genuinely heard and respected, both clinically and emotionally, the outcomes follow. They trust the system. They return for future care. They refer the people they love. Better trust produces better outcomes, and better outcomes produce better reimbursement. This is not a soft argument. It is a business case with real numbers behind it.

The question I always put to leadership teams is this: how does your system demonstrate trust? And how is it truly measured?

The question, “How do you demonstrate trust?” is not about your mission statement or your marketing materials, but in the actual experience of a patient moving through your system on a hard day. The answer is almost never as clear as organizations think it is. And that gap between what institutions believe they’re delivering and what patients are actually experiencing is exactly where I do my work.

I’ve been bringing this conversation and keynote presentation to hospital leadership and patient experience teams, drawing on the qualitative research I have conducted along with the interviews of my Desperate for a Diagnosis podcasts guests, both patients and physicians as well as decades working in the healthcare setting with patients and physicians.

If your organization is doing the hard work of rebuilding trust with the people you serve, I’d love to be part of that conversation.

My “Unheard and Unhealed” presentation is available as a standalone keynote, grand rounds talk, or half-day workshop with facilitation for hospital leadership, patient experience teams and medical conferences.

Booking for 2026 programs. Here is a short clip from the presentation.

Laura M. Nozicka

laura@bigideatango.com 

bigideatango.com

Talk it out. Shake it up. Make it real!

Chicago, IL · Serving hospital and pharma clients nationally