“If I got $10 for every man who asks me to bring his wife in because she knows everything, I’d be a millionaire.”
Dani Schnorr, a doctor, in a video where she describes what, according to her, keeps happening over and over in her office. The man arrives, sits down, and when she asks him what’s wrong, he looks at his wife. She, who came only to accompany him, ends up recounting the symptoms, medical history, and almost the entire clinical history. She also says it’s not all men, but the number is “dangerously high”.
Because some patients, she says, don’t know what medications they take, what condition they have, or who their doctor is. “Nothing, nothing”, she sums up. And what catches her attention most is the basic point: “I should be able to communicate with my patient about what hurts. Because it’s your body”.
She has a name for this behavior: “weaponized incompetence”, which she defines as pretending not to be able to do something so that another person is forced to do it for you. But her criticism doesn’t stop there: she also points to women, who, she says, perpetuate the dynamic when they take responsibility for what belongs to another adult.
That’s what she’s observed in her own experience. Does the scene sound familiar?
Video: