Your Doctor Might Be Wrong: What Can You Do? — Dr. Erin Nance

Airdate: July 30, 2025

Julie Rose: Have you ever felt like a doctor just wasn't listening to you?

Erin Nance, MD: It's really about the communication and the trust, because I think almost every patient understands that doctors make mistakes, people get complications, there are risks, but they want their doctor to be on their team.

Julie Rose: Hey, it's Julie. Welcome to Uncomfy, a show about sticking with moments that challenge us even when they're uncomfortable. And I know you're probably wondering, "Why would anybody choose to be uncomfortable?" But I know from personal experience, and you probably do too, that sometimes a little discomfort has benefits if we can stay open and curious about it. And that's what we're here to explore, so let's get Uncomfy.

Julie Rose: I'm joined by Dr. Erin Nance. She's a board-certified orthopedic surgeon. She's co-host of the Medical Detectives podcast. She's also CEO and founder of a social media company called FeelBetr Health. And now, she's adding author to that list with her debut memoir called "Little Miss Diagnosed: A Surgeon's Guide to Mending Bones and Breaking Rules." Dr. Nance, welcome. Thanks for making time today.

Erin Nance, MD: Oh, thank you so much for inviting me on the show.

Julie Rose: So, the first line of your TEDx talk, and also a major theme in your book, in your podcast, and on TikTok, is that doctors get things wrong all the time, which is not what I wanna hear as a patient, but what's it like as a doctor to contemplate that, to, to admit that?

Erin Nance, MD: You know, I think one thing that we have to acknowledge is that, and this is a, a stolen line from one of my mentors, but, "The eye only sees what the mind knows," and not every doctor is created equal, and so when you have a conversation or a consultation with that doctor, that doctor is coming with their own set of experiences, their own set of learning and knowledge. So, you know, I, I tell people that you are in a partnership with your physician and understanding that every physician doesn't know everything, and sometimes when you don't know everything, you get things wrong. Um, and it's not that we are intentionally trying to get things wrong or, or, you know, hurt patients, but we have to understand that each doctor really does have their kind of specialty, um, and if you feel like you are not getting the answers that you think you deserve or you think may be missed, then please start another relationship with another doctor.

Julie Rose: Can you share a story of, um, having to admit that you don't know or that you got it wrong?

Erin Nance, MD: You know, one of the, you know, chapters in the book, I write about, and I learned this very early on when I was a medical student, but bias creeps into everyone's decision making, for good and for bad. So, this is a, a story about how I was in the psych ward, um, as a psychiatry medical student, and there was a young woman, she had just, um, had a baby, and I was introduced to her. She was wearing a J. Crew cardigan, she's reading, you know, Jane Austen, she, she basically is more put together than I am, um, and I did not understand why she was there. You know, she was not acting irrationally, she was not speaking out of turn, she was not, you know, going off on tangents, and she was there because her family was concerned that she had unusual behaviors, you know, things like she threw out her wedding dress, right? Now, most people wouldn't throw out their wedding dress, um, maybe that's not a normal or typical thing to do, but does that make you worthy of being admitted to a psych hospital? Um, and so they, she had these kind of small incidents where, together, you know, they, they formed a larger picture of something was probably wrong, but to me, all I saw was a really well-behaved woman who probably was taken away from her newborn, just wants to get back to her family. Um, and I rotated off that, that service, and it wasn't until months later when I was grocery shopping, I saw her picture on a tabloid, and it was the story about how she had eloped from the hospital, she had a full-blown schizophrenic break, she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Um, and I just looked at her staring back at me and thinking, "I got this so wrong." I was coming up with every excuse to think of, "Like, why is she here? Like, why are they keeping her, like, against her will? What is, what is going on?" So, yeah, it was a very early lesson to understand that we don't know everything, I certainly didn't know anything, and that my bias, I was giving her too much benefit of the doubt bias because, in the end, she looked like me, and I thought, "Well, I'm not someone, you know, going through something like that." And I think, as physicians, we have to understand that we do have bias and it does influence how we, we treat our patients.

Julie Rose: And how do you counter that, then, as a physician?

Erin Nance, MD: I think it's taking an honest assessment of each patient as an individual. Like, for example, if you are a Black woman having a baby in America today, you have a 30% chance more likelihood of dying than a white woman, okay? So, what that means to me is that, and again, I'm a hand surgeon,

I'm not an OB-GYN, but if I was an OB-GYN, I would be going the extra mile for my patients who were African-American to make sure I'm listening even more to their complaints, that I'm not brushing off any of their concerns because I have to be hypervigilant, right, because this is a vulnerable population that's at increased risk, and the increased risk is because, as a system, we are brushing off their pain, their concerns.

Julie Rose: How does this need for humility, for also acknowledging, "Yeah, I have blind spots, we all have them," how does that fit in, or does it fit in with the way that doctors are trained to think about their expertise and to behave in situations like these?

Erin Nance, MD: Well, it's an excellent point because how we make a diagnosis is through pattern recognition. This goes back to what we were taught and how we were taught. And if you're a 50-year-old woman and you walk into the ER and you say, "I'm having some chest tightness and some difficulty breathing," they're gonna tell you you're having a panic attack and send you home, versus if you are a 50-year-old male and you go to the ER and you say, "I'm having some chest tightness and difficulty breathing," they're gonna give you an EKG, draw labs for troponin to make sure you're not having a heart attack. Now, the data is very clear: more women die of heart attacks after the first 30 days than men. But if you close your eyes and you think, "Who is someone who's having a heart attack?" It's Mr. Big, right, from Sex in the City, it's that man; you're not thinking that it's a woman. So, a lot of this is we have to almost unlearn what our own biases and what the, the established patterns are, and a lot of this goes back to the fact that women were not even included in research studies until 1993, so a lot of the research that we have on how women's symptoms may differ is just so far behind. So, I think the lot of it is, "Do we have the research, the funding for the research to actually understand how different diseases are shown in women?"

Julie Rose: What is it about this message that you think has so resonated with people? Um, you know, this, the, the sort of, you're preaching this message of like, "Misdiagnoses happen. Um, here are the reasons why it ha, happens." Why do you think so many people have glommed onto this, uh, on social media for you?

Erin Nance, MD: I think they're tired. I think they're tired of going to their doctor and being brushed off. I think they're tired of having pain and no one listening to them. I think they're tired of being diagnosed with anxiety and depression when they're really having an autoimmune disorder. Um, so, to me, I think why people really resonated is that, for the first time, it's a doctor acknowledging that these problems exist, right? Because if they talk about it, they're complainers, right? Whereas if I talk about it, it's, "Oh, well, here's su, someone from inside the system who has some authority." And the number one comment I get on my social media posts is, "Thank you. Thank you for finally acknowledging that this exists," because that's the, the first step into change is to acknowledge that the problem exists in the first place.

Julie Rose: Why do you think more doctors aren't acknowledging it, though? I mean, is it tied to just, like, the attorneys are telling 'em not to, like, um, you know, if you get charged with, uh, uh, you know, mistreating someone, right, or malpractice?

Erin Nance, MD: You know, I did a, a post about this a while ago about how doctors do practice defensive medicine because they're worried they're going to be sued. I mean, that's, absolutely, 100%. Um, now this may take a lot of different forms. It may be that they are sending you for, like, lots of different labs and tests and, and you know, you're confused. Um, it may be that they will not admit that something went wrong. I mean, I just had a patient recently who they had a post-op complication that was apparent from two weeks after the surgery, but it wasn't until six months that she actually got the diagnosis. And I think part of it is a lot of times the doctors are putting their head in the sand, right? They don't wanna admit that something went wrong, when I find that, for most patients, it's really about the communication and the trust, because I think almost every patient understands that doctors make mistakes, people get complications, there are risks, but they want their doctor to be on their team and to manage it with them. And again, it starts with acknowledging that the problem exists because if the doctor cannot acknowledge that the problem or the complication exists, then the patient can't get the help that they need. So, on the one hand you have doctors, uh, reluctant to admit that they made a mistake, and then there's also the, the doctor who says, "We've tested everything. Nothing seems to be wrong. You must be fine, or this is in your head," right, so that becomes, like, the "medical mystery" that you also talk a lot about.

Julie Rose: Um, and what's interesting to me about the community that you're building is that you seem to be, um, sort of validating the crowdsourcing, right? I mean, I would think that a doctor would not be thrilled to have a patient say, "I know you've tested everything, but what about this thing that I read on Reddit, or what about this thing that somebody talked about on social media?" You know, a doctor would say, like, "Oh my gosh, I don't, you know, I'm the one with the medical degree." Here you are, a doctor, saying, "Yeah, bring it! Like, more of that," right? You even created a social media platform to kind of encourage that. Has that been an uncomfortable thing for you to embrace?

Erin Nance, MD: Not at all. I kept hearing these stories from patients who found out about the latest clinical trial for breast cancer, not from their doctor, but from someone on Facebook who said, "I'm in this clinical trial in Seattle." And it's, as I said, it's impossible for every doctor to be up to date with every single disease, the conditions, the symptoms, the treatments. There are hundreds of research papers published every day, right? And what I find is that, what I tell patients is, "You know, your body the best," and patients with lived experience often have a wealth of knowledge that a doctor will never be able to give you. So, the reason why I built FeelBetr is, number one, and you can think of FeelBetr as, like, a modern WebMD, so I wanted a place where it was a safe and trusted place for people to get health information. Everybody who has a chronic illness is on Facebook groups, right? Facebook was built as "Hot or Not," all right, that was the original focus of Facebook, it was never designed to support communities about health information. So, I wanted to create this safe and trusted place, and I also wanted to create a place where people knew that the content was coming from credible health sources because I think the most dangerous threat to America right now is health misinformation. So, on FeelBetr, the content is created only by verified either, uh, medical licensed professionals, health foundations, science-backed health brands and corporations, but at the same time, so that's the content, but at the same time, the conversations, we need to include the patients with the lived experience. And I believe that if we create a place where both physician expertise and patient lived experience is accessible and equally valued, you're able to understand, "Okay, this is a informational video from a board-certified doctor, and then these are 10 comments from people who have endometriosis," you're able to understand the difference between those two sources of information, and, sometimes, the information from the individuals may be more valuable than the information that the doctor gave to you. But the whole mission of this platform is to make health literacy more accessible and to empower patients to take the information that they learn from the platform to their own doctors to have a better informed conversation with their doctor.

Julie Rose: Dr. Erin Nance is a board-certified orthopedic surgeon, and she's the founder and CEO of FeelBetr Health, which is B-E-T-R, FeelBetr Health, which is that platform she was just talking about. She's also co-host of the Medical Detectives podcast. She's on social media @littlemissdiagnosed, and her new book is called "Little Miss Diagnosed," it's a memoir. Dr. Nance, thanks for your time today.

Erin Nance, MD: Thank you so much, Julie. It was a pleasure.

Julie Rose: And thank you for getting Uncomfy with us today. Have you had to admit you were wrong recently, or made a mistake and owned up to it? How did you get the nerve to do it, lean into that discomfort? I'd love to hear your story. You can email uncomfy@byu.edu or connect with us on social media to keep the conversation going. Uncomfy is a BYUradio podcast. Samuel Benson produces it, and the team includes Hyobin Kim and Sam Payne. Our theme music was composed by Kelsey Nay. I'm Julie Rose. Can't wait to get Uncomfy with you again next week.