WHY AN AUTISM FRIENDLY DOCTOR IS A MUST FOR AN AUTISTIC PERSON.

28 years ago, my mother reacted with disgust when I told her that I wanted to leave her Australian and Italian-Australian doctors for an Asian doctor. I had some people claim that the fact that many Asian people go to Asian doctors rather than Anglo-Australian or European-Australian doctors is racism in reverse. I say, no, it isn’t, and nor is an Anglo-Australian who has a Chinese doctor engaging in what the white cis-het group call “reverse racism.” It’s human nature for people to seek out similar people and let’s not forget that many a white cis-het male doctor is not trained at university in cultural sensitivity to be able to deal with a non-white person. Now, don’t get me wrong, here, my rheumatologist is an Australian-born Sicilian, and one day, a Chinese-Australian couple were waiting to see him, and they were referred by an Anglo-Australian doctor.

It’s understandable why an Asian person might feel more comfortable with an Asian doctor and it’s equally understandable, in my view, why an autistic Australian may have a better rapport with an Asian doctor than an Australian doctor. Why? Well, I have told the story here of an Asian doctor working at a regional base hospital who was the only doctor on duty one night when an Australian man came in with a cut hand. The Australian man racially abused the doctor and walked out. He later came back and apologised, but as the doctor said, “If you were truly sorry, you wouldn’t have said what you did.” As another Asian-Australian doctor wrote in her memoir, she was assumed to be the nurse when she was the surgeon, and, she was also racially abused by a patient.

Autistic people have had a lifetime of abuse, sometimes by people meant to be caring for them, and just like an Asian person in Australia, an autistic has to try four times as hard to be accepted. Similarly, I feel more comfortable with a female doctor because of my history of sexual abuse and because I know many female doctors who have had to work three or four times as hard to be accepted by not just patients but colleagues, as well.

So, just like a female might feel more comfortable with a female doctor (some females feel more comfortable with a male, too, and some females, and I’ve encountered a few, might feel more comfortable with a female doctor for female problems, like a breast exam, or a pap smear, or shared ante-natal care, but for their general physical health, feel more comfortable with a male), or an Asian with an Asian doctor, an autistic would logically feel more comfortable with an autistic doctor or a doctor who understands autism.

Last week, I had to have a colonoscopy and a gastroscopy and my gastroenterologist is autism-friendly, and she arranged for me to see a female anesthetist, and, what also made me feel comfortable and at home was, she’d told the doctor and the nurses that I could calculate dates, and they asked me what day of the week they were born. They were amazed that I got them right. And my anesthetist is horse loving and I was able to tell her about my grandfather’s horse, Laddie, a three stage horse. He began his life as a trotting horse called Toby Two, then he became a police horse, then my uncle bought him and took him my grandparents’ place, where he lived until I was 14 and he later died.

The nurses were also interested in the fact that I was reading Clem Bastow’s memoir, Late Bloomer: How An Autism Diagnosis Changed My Life. For me, the book was a comfort item, just like my Japanese items and Chinese items.

My father said, “Oh, but you could have had it locally,” and, I said to him, “If my rheumatologist said I needed a hip replacement, I would have to be referred to an orthopedic surgeon, as my rheumatologist couldn’t do that. But what’s the good of having a gastroenterologist who performs colonoscopies if you’re going to go elsewhere?” I thought, “Fair enough if you had Crohn’s Disease and Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis and you had a gastroenterologist who specialized in liver conditions and another who specialized in bowel conditions and you needed a stent in a bile duct, you would want a certain one to do it, but when you have a gastroenterologist who does them, it defeats the point.” And, a local colonoscopy clinic wouldn’t have been briefed enough to know my circumstances.

So, when one considers the fact that autistic people have a shorter life expectancy than neurotypical folk, one of the things that can increase and improve an autistic person’s life expectancy is a good relationship with their doctors, so, just like it’s good for LGBTIQA people to have a rapport with a doctor, and an Asian person in a Western society, the same applies to an autistic person in a neurotypical society.