80 HONEST QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD ASK YOUR DOCTOR
- Madhukar Dama
- Jun 16
- 11 min read
You walk into a clinic, trusting the white coat. You follow the prescription, take the pills, do the tests. You return, again and again, but the body stays confused. Somewhere along the way, healing got replaced by managing. Relief became routine. And questions were replaced with silence. This list is for those who want their health back — not just their reports. These questions are not against doctors, but against a system that made doctors forget healing. If you’ve ever felt something was missing in your treatment, you’re not alone. And you’re not wrong to ask.
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🧠 Rethinking Modern Medicine: 80 Honest Questions for Every Doctor
These questions are not meant to insult doctors. They are for every patient who wants to understand why, despite so much progress, sickness is still increasing. These questions expose blind spots, challenge medical overconfidence, and invite honesty.
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⚕️ On Cure and Healing
1. Why are most diseases called “manageable” but not “curable”?
2. If the treatment is right, why does the disease return when medicine stops?
3. Do you believe full healing is possible — or just control?
4. Why is healing not the goal — only maintenance?
5. How many of your patients have permanently recovered?
6. Why are relapses so common, even after full courses of treatment?
7. Is the goal to remove the disease — or keep it under control forever?
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💊 On Medicines
8. Are medicines designed to remove the root cause — or just reduce symptoms?
9. Can long-term medicine weaken the body’s natural healing?
10. Have you refused to prescribe medicine when you felt it was overused?
11. Are all your prescriptions based on real need — or also habit?
12. Why are some medicines given “just in case” without clear reason?
13. How often do you stop a medicine once it starts?
14. Is medicine dependency common — but rarely acknowledged?
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🧪 On Tests and Reports
15. Why are patients often sent for many tests, even with simple complaints?
16. If the test is normal but the patient is still sick, do you trust the person — or the report?
17. How often do tests create more confusion or fear than clarity?
18. Are normal values always meaningful — or just numbers from a lab?
19. Is the rise in diagnostic tests driven by need — or business?
20. Can too many tests lead to unnecessary treatment?
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🏥 On Surgeries and Procedures
21. How many surgeries are truly unavoidable?
22. Have you ever advised someone to delay or avoid a surgery that was being pushed?
23. Why are second opinions often discouraged?
24. Are some procedures done more for profit than for health?
25. Can the body sometimes heal without surgery — but the option is never offered?
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💼 On the Business Side of Healthcare
26. Is your hospital run for healing — or for targets and revenue?
27. Do insurance rules affect how you treat people?
28. Are patients given fear-based advice to agree to costly treatments?
29. How much control do you have — and how much is decided by management?
30. Can poor patients get the same level of care?
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🧠 On Medical Education and Knowledge
31. How much of your education was sponsored by pharma companies?
32. Are you trained to cure — or to follow protocol?
33. Do you keep learning — or just follow standard guidelines?
34. Can you challenge your own textbooks when needed?
35. Why is questioning medical authority seen as disrespect?
36. Do you believe nature can heal — or only science?
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🧍 On the Patient’s Voice
37. Do you listen fully before interrupting?
38. Is a patient’s personal experience ever more valid than a report?
39. Why is it called “non-compliance” when a patient chooses differently?
40. Do you inform patients about natural or lifestyle alternatives?
41. Are you open to patients doing their own research?
42. How often do patients leave your clinic with peace — not confusion?
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🧘 On Lifestyle and Prevention
43. Do you explain food, rest, walking, and stress relief as central to healing?
44. How many patients could recover just by changing lifestyle?
45. Do you personally follow the lifestyle you recommend?
46. Why is daily walking not written like a prescription?
47. Do you believe that fasting, sunlight, and clean food can reverse disease?
48. Is prevention really your priority — or just early detection?
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❤️ On Ethics and Responsibility
49. Have you admitted when your treatment didn’t work?
50. Do you feel free to treat according to conscience — or bound by systems?
51. Have you ever recommended against a profitable treatment?
52. Do you take time to understand the whole person — not just the illness?
53. Can a disease be caused by stress, grief, or loneliness — and should that be part of the discussion?
54. Have you ever said, “Let’s wait and watch” instead of acting too fast?
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🌿 On Natural and Traditional Methods
55. Why are herbs, castor oil, and food-based remedies rarely even mentioned?
56. Are you aware of successful traditional healing cases?
57. Is natural healing dismissed because it threatens the system?
58. Why can’t modern and traditional methods work together?
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🧍♂️ On Patient Empowerment
59. Do you ever say: “You can heal — without lifelong treatment”?
60. Are patients taught how to stay healthy — or just how to manage disease?
61. Should every patient learn self-care before reaching for pills?
62. Have you helped someone stop all medicines safely?
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🔁 On Overdiagnosis and Fear
63. How many people are treated for problems they don’t even feel?
64. Can the idea of disease sometimes cause more damage than the disease itself?
65. Is fear of disease being sold to increase checkups and treatments?
66. Why is anxiety about health growing, despite better access?
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💬 On Respect and Trust
67. Do you show equal respect to an uneducated patient as to a rich one?
68. Can healing begin with human connection, not technology?
69. Have you sat beside a patient — not just across the table?
70. Have you ever said, “I don’t know”?
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🔍 On the Doctor’s Own Health and Values
71. Are most doctors healthy themselves?
72. Do you take time to slow down and reflect — or are you always rushed?
73. Do you value kindness as part of your treatment?
74. Do you feel free — or trapped in a system that no longer heals?
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🔚 Final Accountability
75. Would you give the same treatment to your own child?
76. Do you keep track of those who heal — not just those who stay on treatment?
77. What do you want to be remembered for — healing or managing?
78. Is your life an example of the health you want to give others?
79. What would you do if there were no medicine — just people needing care?
80. Are you willing to change if a better, simpler path appears?
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This is not an attack. This is a mirror. A mirror held up not just to doctors, but to us — the patients who gave up our voice. Somewhere, between appointments and prescriptions, we stopped asking, stopped doubting, and stopped thinking. These questions are the beginning of taking that power back. A real doctor, a true healer, will welcome these questions. Because when patients think, question, and choose consciously — healing begins, even before medicine does. And that’s what all good doctors truly want.
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“The Patient Who Refused to Stay Sick”
(A slow-burning letter to the machine, from someone it failed to silence)
Let me tell you about a man who didn’t want a miracle.
He just wanted to feel like himself again.
His name was nothing special — Ajay, Ravi, Meena, Salma, Joseph — the kind you hear at chai stalls and hospital queues. He wasn't a rebel. He didn’t believe in conspiracies. He paid taxes, followed prescriptions, waited his turn. He wanted his body to work, like it used to, before the pills lined his shelf like soldiers preparing for a war that never ends.
They called him a patient.
But he wasn’t patient anymore.
Because after fifteen visits, three MRI scans, a file thicker than his marriage album, and a cupboard full of multicolored pills — he was still sick. Not dying. Just sick. Vague. In-between. Unclear. Tired. Not enough to hospitalize, but enough to slowly lose his peace.
So one day, he did something dangerous.
He started asking questions.
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Not the dramatic kind.
Not “Is this system evil?”
Just simple ones:
“Will this medicine cure me, or only manage my problem?”
“Why do I feel worse even though the tests say I’m fine?”
“Can I stop taking this medicine one day, or is this forever?”
And that was the beginning of his second illness — the illness of being difficult.
Because in the clean white rooms of modern medicine, the one thing more dangerous than a virus is a patient who wants to understand.
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He wasn’t against doctors.
He just wanted honesty.
But honesty is expensive in a system built on speed, protocol, and fear.
They didn’t have time to explain. They had targets. SOPs. Guidelines.
He wasn’t a person — he was a case, a code, a repeat appointment.
He asked:
“Why am I always told what to do, but never asked what I eat, how I sleep, whether I’m grieving, or if I even want this path?”
Silence.
He asked:
“If food, rest, and sunlight are free and powerful, why aren’t they the first prescription?”
Silence.
He asked:
“If I healed, completely — would the system still earn anything from me?”
Now they looked at him like he was sick in the wrong way.
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This man was from a place that knew suffering well.
A small town, maybe. Or a big city’s forgotten corner.
He watched his uncle die after chemotherapy, not from the cancer but from the weight of it all.
He watched his neighbour limp home after a surgery that promised a miracle but delivered pain.
He saw his friend go mad with fear after being told his numbers were “slightly abnormal”.
He knew what unspoken things looked like.
He knew when people were “managing” illness, not healing from it.
He didn’t want to be next.
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So he found Madhukar.
Not a doctor. Not a miracle man. Just someone who listened.
An old healer who didn’t prescribe on the first visit.
Who kept a bottle of castor oil, a book of food wisdom, and more silence than speech.
He sat with him under a neem tree. Chickens clucked nearby. The sun didn’t rush.
And the man asked, again.
This time, someone answered.
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“You are not defective,” Madhukar said.
“You are just unheard. And mistreated by a system that forgot what healing means.”
He explained how the body remembers health if we stop interrupting it.
He spoke of rest, of food, of rituals, of warm oil on a tired belly, of fasting once a fortnight, of walking barefoot, of grieving properly, of not fighting every fever as if it were death itself.
No drama. No revolution. Just dignity.
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This essay isn’t a war cry.
It is a slow funeral for blind trust.
A farewell to the belief that more tests mean more truth.
A goodbye to the idea that healing is something bought, injected, or forced.
And it is a soft birth — of something gentler.
The return of the thinking patient.
The kind who asks:
“Why?”
“For how long?”
“What if I did nothing, and just listened to my body for once?”
And most dangerous of all:
“What if I healed, and never came back?”
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Because in a world addicted to control, healing is the ultimate rebellion.
🩺 THE PATIENT WHO REFUSED TO STAY SICK
A slow-burning letter to the machine, from someone it failed to silence
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PART 1: “First You’re a Patient. Then You’re a Prisoner.”
Once the prescription begins, it rarely ends.
Once the test is printed, a follow-up is mandatory.
Once the word chronic is stamped, your freedom ends quietly, in a waiting room with air conditioning and no clocks.
No one tells you that the disease may leave — but the system never does.
You become a lifelong customer.
A monthly payment.
A body with a barcode.
In the early days, you trust it all.
Doctors become gods. Machines become prophets. Reports become commandments.
Then, the contradiction begins:
> "Your sugar is under control."
"Your liver is okay."
"Your scan is clean."
Yet… you still feel like something’s wrong.
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PART 2: “Healing Is Inconvenient for the Business Model”
Let’s say you heal. Fully.
What happens?
You cancel your appointments.
You stop buying pills.
You don’t need scans.
You don’t spread panic to others.
You disappear — not from life, but from the ledger.
And to the machine, that is a kind of death.
So instead of healing, they offer management.
> “It’s lifelong.”
“You’ll have to adjust.”
“This is normal at your age.”
These are not medical facts.
These are exit strategies — polite ways to say, “We can’t fix you, but we can keep you paying.”
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PART 3: “The Questions That Broke the Illusion”
Our patient, Ajay, wasn’t born skeptical.
But truth has a taste. Once you’ve tasted it, you can’t go back to bland obedience.
Here are the questions he asked — and what each question did:
“Will I be on this medicine forever?” → Unveiled dependency.
“What caused this illness in the first place?” → Uncovered ignorance.
“Can food, rest, or rituals help?” → Exposed neglect.
“Why do I get sicker with each new medicine?” → Showed side-effects were not side — they were central.
“Will you still care if I stop being a patient?” → Silence.
Each question is a crack in the wall.
And every crack lets light in.
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PART 4: “The Return to Common Sense”
Ajay found healing where the machine wasn’t looking:
In hot castor oil packs on his stomach, easing a decade of digestive chaos.
In skipping one dinner a week, letting his gut breathe.
In lying down with legs on a wall, instead of more BP pills.
In turmeric ghee instead of antacids.
In asking his body, gently, “What are you trying to tell me?”
This wasn’t magic. This was remembering.
Healing is not new.
It’s just been buried under packaging.
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PART 5: “But What About Emergency Medicine?”
Yes — surgery saves lives.
Yes — modern tools are useful.
Yes — doctors work hard.
This is not about blame.
It’s about balance.
A tool is not the problem.
Worshipping it blindly is.
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PART 6: “How the System Turns Curable Into Chronic”
The moment your care becomes a business, your recovery becomes a loss.
So you’re kept just well enough to function — but never well enough to leave.
BP: Managed, not resolved.
Diabetes: Controlled, not reversed.
PCOS: Masked, not healed.
Anxiety: Suppressed, not listened to.
Pain: Blocked, not understood.
They treat symptoms like enemies.
But symptoms are messengers.
Kill the messenger — and the real enemy stays hidden.
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PART 7: “In India, It’s Even Worse”
Here, the village woman walks 6 km to a PHC, waits 3 hours, and gets 3 strips of pills.
She has no idea what they are, but she trusts.
Here, the city father sells a goat to get an MRI — and still doesn't get a clear answer.
He feels like a failure. But the system failed him.
Here, the middle-class man is mocked for using castor oil. “Where’s your evidence?” they ask.
He healed. That’s his evidence.
We imported the Western system. But we left behind our own wisdom.
And now we’re sick in two languages.
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PART 8: “The End is a Beginning”
Ajay didn’t abandon allopathy.
He just outgrew the idea that it was complete.
He still goes to the doctor if he breaks a bone.
But he doesn’t run for every headache.
He knows now:
Healing is daily.
And health is not the absence of disease — it’s the presence of sense.
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🌿 Epilogue: You Are Allowed to Ask
You are allowed to ask why.
You are allowed to walk away from prescriptions that make you worse.
You are allowed to be your own healer.
You are allowed to remember what your grandmother knew.
You are allowed to not stay sick just because the system expects you to.
Because the strongest medicine of all
is a human being who finally decided to listen to their own body.
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