I waited months after a virtual consult to fly in for an in-person visit with Rana. That was a colossal waste of time, money, and effort. If I'd stuck with the virtual, I would've been spared the indignity. Lesson learned - too late for me, maybe not for you.
The whole encounter veered from merely unpleasant to downright humiliating. I was talked down to, talked over, gaslit, and treated in a belittling manner. The irony? These are the exact complaints women often lob at men. Here, the genders were flipped. Congratulations, we've finally managed to achieve gender equality in the field of condescension.
Instead of curiosity, Rana trafficked in judgment. She asked intrusive, irrelevant personal questions that had nothing to do with the treatment. All of it was already answered in the intake paperwork I dutifully completed, but reading that apparently wasn't on the agenda. A five-minute glance at my file would've answered everything asked and then some. Yes, schedules are busy, but carving out time to do that work can be the difference between error and accuracy - and that should matter to a medical professional.
Shout-out here to Claire, Rana's nurse and assistant, who was excellent. She was empathetic, attentive, asked questions, and actually listened - the one bright spot in an otherwise negative experience.
Rana, by contrast, leaned on hastily constructed narratives spun from scraps of incomplete information, showing no interest in dialog, nuance, context, or the patient's own private subjective knowledge and perspective. Plus, said plainly, her grasp of male aesthetics and psychology was seriously limited. Maybe that passes unnoticed in her broader practice, where the demographic skews female, but it lands hard when you're on the receiving end. It's like a veterinarian shrugging off chinchilla care: a fine professional choice if 99% of your business is cats and dogs, but if you actually are the chinchilla, you're out of luck. Male patients should take note.
Despite the knowledge gap, Rana dispensed opinions and viewpoints with a certainty and assuredness that suggested deep expertise...except the knowledge simply wasn't there. That dichotomy, better known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, is something I usually associate with blustery young men who mistake confidence for competence. In this case, the role reversal was again striking. Chalk up another win for equality.
I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, so writing something like this was hard. But sitting through my session at the clinic was harder. read more
