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Going to yet another medical appointment, waiting for hours, andall the rest that comes with chronic illness can make you feel like a number. In this column for HealthCentral, I share tips for person-first care at the doctor’s office:

““See how the vocal cords are stiff? This is common in people with rheumatoid arthritis or someone who has been intubated for long time.”

This rather vital information about the state of my vocal cords was shared by my doctor with an intern but not with me. While they studied the video of innards of my throat, I sat behind them, unable to turn my wheelchair in the small room to see video, nor was I given the opportunity to ask questions about this. And it’s not the first time I have been ignored while a doctor teaches an intern about what’s happening to my body. It’s also not the only way I’ve been dehumanized in a medical setting. I’ve been referred to as “the patient in bed 21,” even “the hip replacement in room 105.” I’ve stared at the backs of doctors’ heads while they focused on a computer monitor throughout the entirety of an appointment, or watched them visibly disengage from our conversation as they answer messages from the front desk without as much as a “Do you mind if I take this?”

My rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is not all that I am. I’m a person with quirks and preferences, a sense of humor and curiosity, an adult who is firmly in charge of my life. But everything that makes me a unique individual tends to disappear when I step into a doctor’s office or hospital. There, my RA enters the room first and it takes up a lot of space. So much so that the medical professional I’m consulting often sees only my illness instead of me, the person who has the condition. Unfortunately, this kind of experience is fairly common and as someone with a chronic condition like RA, you might encounter more of these, simply because you have more medical appointments and tests than the average healthy person. In this column, I’ll share some of the things I do to help doctors see me as a person. Perhaps this might help you flip the script, as well.

Don’t get me wrong, I do understand that it takes energy to connect with a new person every 10 minutes and that this can be difficult and tiring when a practitioner sees 40 or more people in a day. But an unreasonably high patient-to-provider rate is just one barrier the healthcare system places between the staff and you. Another is the emphasis on physician control—up until quite recently, doctors were considered the ultimate authority, and this is reflected in the language we still use about health care. For instance, you should “follow doctor’s orders” and if you don’t, you are “not compliant.” This approach doesn’t work anymore. For one, health care is not the military, and you are not a lowly private. The lack of medical school emphasis on skills related to connecting and communicating with patients is another barrier. Thankfully, this is changing. More doctors are now following a patient-centered care model, an approach that respects patient preferences and opinions when making decisions. To which I say: “Ha! They’d better,” as it’s my body and my life that is affected by those decisions and as such, I should have veto power.”

Read my column about how to get your doctor to see you as a person on HealthCentral.