Does anybody else feel that visiting a doctor in Japan (as a foreigner with limited Japanese) is pointless?

43 comments

1. Yes, life is hard if you can’t speak the language of the country in which you reside.

   Adapt.

2. Pointless? No.

   That’s why you use one of the various search engines for “English Speaking Doctors”, many prefectures maintain lists.

   You want a thorough check up you have to ask for one. A specialist doctor can look at a throat and pretty easily know what’s wrong, it’s not as complicated as a stomach problem, for the most part. If the medicine they gave you isn’t working, you need to communicate that fact.

   I’ve had through checkups several times, depends on the problem.

3. It’s not that going to the doctor is pointless, it’s that you’re going to the doctor for pointless things. Mild throat infection aka a common cold = almost always viral. There’s literally nothing for a doctor to do. They’re only prescribing you antibiotics to shut you up basically.

4. “Too much sweets”? o_O

   Anyway, it depends. I’ve had tonsillitis here, and that got reasonably nailed. Likewise with the weird lump on my hand, they cut it off real quick.

   Probably best to avoid the quacks though.

5. Maybe you don’t need a thorough checkup each time you go to the doctor

6. Are you going to a 内科 instead of a 耳鼻科? Since you say THE clinic, try another one.

7. Yeah I feel your pain. Had a problem that took three visits to get the right treatment, despite me stating that I was worried it was X n the first visit (turns out it was X…). Couldn’t get them to take an actual test, they just wanted to prescribe something and get me out. A test would have confirmed it within a few days.

8. Have you tried asking for a thorough check up? If you go to the doctor and tell them your throat hurts, they are going to give you something against that and call it a day. If you think there might be an underlying issue, you might wanna tell them that. You can get allergy checks etc. done at the 耳鼻科 or other clinics, maybe look into that.

9. Same. I used to get injection because my tonsils get bad , doctor recommended me if i get sick more than 4 times a year to take my tonsils away. in japan the doctor give me some pills, go home, wait one week. so now I’m super careful with sweat, change clothes if get wet, drinking with no ice and others. I even sleep with scarf in summer if I feel my throat is not ok. save previous throat medicine they gave me.
   It sucks and I’m also clueless like you, this for 10 years.

10. Not my experience at all. I’ve mainly dealt with orthopedic clinics and have had X-rays or CT scans almost immediately. Even had a precautionary MRI to check my ACL condition.

    Do you keep returning to the same doctor? If not, you should to build up a medical history that the doctor can notice a pattern. If you have been, then it’s time to look for a new doctor – try to find someone more specialized.

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12. There’s a lot of contributors to japanlife I’ve noticed who seem to have diagnosed themselves before they go to a doctors by reading stuff online and then get a bit pissy when the doctor doesn’t want to agree with them.

13. No, I’m actually glad that when I go to the doctor when I have a cold they get me in and out in just a few minutes with the prescription for (decent) cold medicine.

    How the system works is that first they usually give a brief exam and give you a prescription. They only order testing if they think it’s worth while.

    If for some reason the medicine doesn’t work, you go back and tell the doctor. At that point they will change your medication, run more tests or refer you out to a different hospital.

14. Do you think it would be any different anyplace else if you were unable to communicate with the doctors? Basically, you’re foisting your inability to communicate onto the doctor.

15. So does the medicine work? If they aren’t, you’ll have to go back and tell them that.

    Doctors are not going to perform extensive testing and assessment for hay fever or a sore throat, unless there is some indication that it is not a simple case.

16. I’ve got a way more thorough check up here than I’ve ever had back home. But you know yourself that your throat is sensitive and it’s a recurring issue, so idk why you expected them for a thorough check up for something that’s routine… What sort of thorough check up are you expecting? If you want a thorough check up you can just ask, or change doctor/clinics since individual doctors may have different approaches.

17. >hay, weather changes

    Doc can’t do anything about those.

    > eating too much sweets, etc.

    That’s on you. What are you expecting them to do? Are you expecting a “thorough check up” to turn up something different when you’re already mentioning what’s causing it?

18. Please provide full context. Are you going to like 1 doctor every single time or different ones?
    What type of doctors? Internal medicine? ent? Or what?
    What is the review of the clinic on the internet? (May not be 100% accurate but provided an insight)

19. If you know that your infection is caused by too much sweets, maybe, just maybe, eat less of them? I’m no doctor though…

20. Go to the correct type of specialist. A regular 内科 isn’t good for much more than giving you prescriptions for symptoms.

21. It’s not pointless, but for subtle things like throat irritation, it’s a roulette wheel finding the right doctor.

    My story: I had a constant sore throat. I would mention it to the doctors, they’d do a quick check & say it looked fine.

    But, one time I had a painful ear infection. Mentioned it to the new young doctor, and she was into a weird treatment & suggested using that to clear out the remaining ear congestion. (Epipharyngeal Abrasive Treatment). Well, it hasn’t helped the lingering ear congestion, but it turns out that my adenoids were inflamed, and the pain displaces to the throat.The EAT and a nebulizer treatment with Linderon fixed that up, although it is a chronic condition.

    I would get good at ears, nose & throat Japanese if I were you, and just keep asking around about doctors until you find a good fit.

22. Went to many ENTs until I found one that took me seriously. Turns out I had throat cancer. I’m N2 level, but still had to do some vocabulary study for cancer. I recommend at least learning basic vocabulary for describing symptoms and such.

23. Every time I’ve gone to the doctor for a reason they do full blood work, chest xray, ekg, the works. Not sure what all that has to do with a sprained ankle, but they always tell me how pretty my lungs are.

24. I hate to say it, but sometimes you just have to keep going to a different doctor each week until you find a good one.

25. Its not because you’re a foreigner. Its because that’s all they can do for a sore throat.
    Basically the only thing you can do is let a sore throat/cold run it’s course and suppress the symptoms with painkillers and cough suppressants.

    The point of going to the doc is to be able to use your health insurance to get the meds cheaper than you would buying it yourself at the pharmacy.

26. Even with native Japanese, many doctors seem to just want to get you out the door. We finally found one who doesn’t just say “kaze”.

    When we recently got sick he actually tested for covid, pneumonia and influenza. Turned out we had influenza and we were able to treat it within the first 48hrs when treatment is most effective.

27. What kind of doctor are you going to and are you going to the same one each time, or doctor hopping?

28. Throat infections are literally one of the most common things people get, and doctor only needs visual check to confirm it. The fact that you never needed further treatment is the proof that the doctor wasn’t wrong with the visual confirmation.

    Japan doesn’t have a Family Doctor system like in some parts of the world, so they’re not going to suggest you for a checkup unless you’re old enough.

29. Fortunately I haven’t been to see a doctor since I actually learned how to speak Japanese, we’re talking years ago.

    I do remember visiting the doctor a few times in my first years here before I could speak the language and it always played out like this:

    1. Receive the absolute dread and fearful look on their face that a foreigner is in there office.
    2. The doctor is petrified beyond belief but his assistant/nurse is weirdly always nice and really happy that I’m there.
    3. Looks at me for 2 seconds
    4. I get a big bag of what feels like thousands of different drugs that need to be taken 4 times a day, 8 pills each time.
    5. I feel better and have a bag of pills left over to throw in the cupboard to forgot about.

30. I had a similar experience with a series of doctors who were dismissive of what I said and made dumb comments like “oh the Japanese air doesn’t agree with your foreign lungs” though I told them I was asthmatic. What started out as probably bronchitis escalated without proper treatment and caused me to miss nearly a month of work. And I speak fluent Japanese, so it wasn’t even a language barrier issue. Later, I found a doctor who took the time to get to know me and listen and who also used science rather than holistic, racist nonsense. She also spoke English, so English-speaking doctors do exist, even in the inaka!!

    Long story short – Don’t settle for a doctor who is dismissive. Shop around. Preferably before you have a health crisis, find a GP you click with (and can communicate with!) and establish a relationship. You can just tell them you’re trying to establish a GP or establish yourself as a patient when setting up the appointment. It may be inconvenient but don’t risk your health for convenience.

    Edit to add: the dismissive doctors also prescribed meds with no exam, and also with little regard to my symptoms (like Zantac for chest pain from 2 months of coughing and fever). Good doctor that listened performed proper examinations and prescribed appropriately. My gauge for measurement being I didn’t end up *back in the ER.

31. You get infections when you eat too many sweets? How many sweets are we talking about here?
    That…doesn’t sound right. You definitely have some sort of other underlying health issue. Maybe do a little homework and search up the words for throat afflictions that might be the culprit before going into your next examination, then bring up that you’re specifically concerned about these because the infections are recurring.
    You could also go find another clinic rather than returning to the same one every time.

32. You might benefit from doing more of your own research into your problems. Have you had an allergy test? That helped me identify my allergies and then since then been on good medication for it.

    I find that the doctor patient thing sometime isn’t that different from other provider-customer relationships, but sometimes you do need to be suggestive about what you’re looking for. It’s hard to stand.up for yourself in a language you can’t really use so you might need to put in some extra prep for it.

33. I’ve had major surgery here and been treated for any number of minor issues.

    Never had an issue. Though of course have occasionally found “bad” doctors that were not great at finding the problem.

34. Be prepared when you go to the doctor. Especially, if you don’t speak good Japanese.

    Recently, I wrote a 20 line line essay about what was wrong and translated it into Japanese. I did this mainly to learn the expressions and vocabulary that I didn’t know. I have been in hospital for a extended stay, once more for an operation and have been to all sorts of clinics by myself so I don’t really mind going to the doctor and speaking Japanese to them.

    This time I brought along my essay and showed it to the doctor and an unexpected thing happened. He read all of it before making any judgement. Usually, after a couple of seconds he would be jumping into some conclusion and if my first utterances weren’t clear then he might get the wrong end of the stick.

    These days, anyone can use Google translate (then reverse translate Japanese to English to check) and print out an A4 sheet at the convenience store. So try and put down all the facts. Include the original English after the translation as it might be useful for clarification.

    The biggest point though about going to the doctor in Japan is recieving antibiotics when you need them.

35. Literally few hours ago I am back from a consultation regarding tonsillitis. Although it was a 1.5 hour waiting time the actual consultation lasted under 10minutes. And although I used a transation app, I made sure to ask all questions. I thought it was pretty decent. And it’s not like you can avoid visiting.

36. This isn’t unique to Japan. Swedish doctors will treat you exactly the same for those symptoms even if you’re a native Swede.

37. Why are you not going to an ENT? There is one on every other corner. Search 耳鼻科 (ENT)

38. From my experience, the doctors were really bad in Tokyo. I went as I was feeling ill, throat hurt, had nausea, the doctor prescribed me some strepsils and cough medicine, charged me about $60. i was in Vietnam the week after, still feeling ill, so I saw a doctor there. After checking my throat and performing a bunch of blood tests, he told me I had a bacterial throat infection and needed to be on anti-biotics. He was shocked that the Japanese doctor didn’t pick this up. And this was in Vietnam!

39. You just described GP’s globally.

40. I don’t speak Japanese so “clinic with a website and that speaks English” tend to be “high end”, which probably biases my answer a lot. But luckily I only had great experiences with the doctors here (getting TO the doctor is another story though).

    I went to the doctor for non-trivial reasons 3 times (1 hospital + 2 clinics); the hospital it was a holiday and it’s clear they called the doctor from home, but she seemed to be very good and gave a quick and thorough diagnostic. The other two times (clinic), one I had to push just a tiny bit to do some more tests, but otherwise no, I didn’t feel like you at all OP. In any case they felt quick and efficient, but not rushed.

    Same for the regular checkups, if I have any small questions or anything I def feel heard and usually get told “that’s usually because of X, with the rest of your results no concern”. I even got a couple of vaccines recommended and took them since I had not take them in my home country.

41. In my experience its hit or miss with docs as in any other country. You have those that go by the book and do 2 + 2 = 4 this is what the manual says you should take, and those that actually apply experience and do a common sensical evaluation.

42. hmm it’s a thing here in japan: cheap healthcare, too many private clinics, same amount as convenience store. And since most people only go to clinic for trivial illnesses, doctors have to keep it rush to keep up with high rotation of customers to maintain profits. Same goes for dentists: you got your teeth mended for like 1500yen, so dentist gotta make your visit short and repetitive to earn cash. People with money will order a family doctor, and truly sick people go to emergency ICU

43. You’re living in a foreign country where the doctors do not speak English. Why not get your Japanese up to a level that allows you to converse with your doctor? You’ll find a completely different experience, I assure you.

    I’ve had nothing but good interactions with doctors in Japan as a foreigner (in Japanese). Nobody owes it to you to learn English in Japan.