I'm college-educated and spent 20 years in corporate management before gravitating to medical transcription, where I was basically self-taught in terms of all the nomenclature and understanding of all things medical sufficient to transcribe, meaning I have some background knowledge and don't need anyone to dumb things down for me. When I suddenly became ill with intense pain in my right side, I told the first doctor I saw that I thought it was my appendix. The surgeon he consulted thought not. Four weeks later, after seeing five different physicians in total, and after being potentially diagnosed with things like Hep A and PID, and then being told I needed to schedule a colonoscopy, guess what? The original surgeon finally agreed It WAS my appendix, and then proceeded to inform me in a rather snotty way that I have a weird system because my temperature never exceeded 102 and my white counts were never what they expect to see with a raging infection. I also suspect it was because I managed to stay alive in spite of all their fumbling around. The surgeon's snotty remark about my 'weird system' felt plenty condescending to me.