I will say, as a young patient with what turned out to be a rare disease, my PCP def thought I was being hysterical and didn’t want to refer me to a neurologist despite some alarming symptoms and his decision to not perform a neurologic exam during my office visit. It was a careful line to tread because I was worried about getting labeled a problem patient. I was (hopefully) politely persistent, but even when I did manage to get a referral, his language was very vague (healthy young female, athletic, foot pain) and the neurology center sat on the referral for a month or so - meanwhile I was slowly loosing the ability to walk. So I had a local podiatrist take x-rays of my feet (very characteristic, needed them for orthotics anyway) and then called the neurology center and asked the PCC to just route the X-rays to whatever triaging doc was assessing referrals - they called back in 5 minutes and I had my appointment, and a diagnosis and plan a week later.

To be fair, I’m pretty mild mannered at baseline and the only reason I had the balls to do the above is that I’m currently a neurology resident and was 99% sure something was very wrong. I guess my takeaway is that for some patient populations (especially young people, and particularly young women) it can be uphill battle if you have some weird shit going on.

Yes I did get a new PCP after that.