Doctors have lost their way. They are service providers, who provide routine checkups and medical procedures from their offices, surgery centers, or hospitals. They are compensated by your insurance provider, and depending on your insurance coverage you may have to pay a portion of their cost out of pocket.
Since you are paying them, no matter if it’s your insurance company writing the check or you writing the check, you’re still paying them. Doesn’t that mean you hired this person and his team and they now all work for you? But that doesn’t seem like the case does it? Within the doctors' minds, there still lies that God Complex. They received the God Complex at the same time they were handed their medical degree. Some things are never going to change.
Things were different when I was a kid. There used to be doctors who ran private practices. Some doctors ran them out of their homes others did house calls. They were independent of the constraints of corporate-owned groups, and even physician co-ops. They took their time with you, looked at your body, and felt around for things that shouldn’t be there. When is the last time a doctor asked you where it hurt and ran his hands over the area carefully to try and make a diagnosis? It happened once, maybe twice in the last couple of years I had to start visiting doctors on a regular basis.
Instead of staying with a patient as long as practical, the doctor, who is now an employee of the conglomerate or group. So, they’re not working for you, they’re working for the group. You are just like a refrigerator, a car, or some other commodity waiting in line to be diagnosed and hopefully fixed.
Most groups expect a doctor to see a minimum of 25 to 30 patients a day if they hope to keep their job. They are allowed 30 minutes of consultation time with a new patient and 15 minutes with an existing patient. Next time you are in a doctor's office notice how he or she is watching the time from the moment they walk through the door.
Their allegiance is not focused on you but on the employer that’s breathing down their neck. What happened to the Hippocratic Oath? Here it is in full form:
I swear by Apollo the physician, and Aesculapius, and Health, and All-heal, and all the gods and goddesses, that, according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this Oath and this stipulation—to reckon him who taught me this Art equally dear to me as my parents, to share my substance with him, and relieve his necessities if required; to look upon his offspring in the same footing as my own brothers, and to teach them this Art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or stipulation; and that by precept, lecture, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the Art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to disciples bound by a stipulation and oath according to the law of medicine, but to none others. I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel, and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art. I will not cut persons laboring under the stone but will leave this to be done by men who are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves. Whatever, in connection with my professional practice or not, in connection with it, I see or hear, in the life of men, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret. While I continue to keep this Oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art, respected by all men, at all times! But should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot!
(In other words, I will lead a decent life and look out for my patients, and perform any unnecessary or prohibited procedures.)
Things have certainly changed. They come out to ring the cash register now and could care less about your well-being. There’s always the exception, that refrain I often hear about somebody’s doctor looking out for them for over 20 years. That makes sense since things were different even 20 years ago. The soul hadn’t yet been sucked completely from the heart of the medical profession. It took a while, going back to the late ’60s, but that’s another story for another time.
Some months ago I woke in the middle of the night, fell, and broke the index finger on my left hand.
I didn’t want to go to the emergency room because my wife and I caught Covid in the hospital a few days after I had a procedure to clear a blockage in an artery on the left side of my leg. The next morning I called my GP. They couldn’t see me for a week. So, I taped my dislocated finger up and went about my business until my appointment rolled around.
When I saw my doctor she sent me out for an x-ray because they didn’t have a machine in their office. After the x-rays were taken I asked the technician how long it would take for my doctor to get the x-ray and I was told no later than the next morning. The afternoon of the following day, I called my doctor to ask about the x-ray. Their reply was they wouldn’t get those for five or six days.
Oh no, no! The pain was getting worse and my finger had to be set. I called the lab where the X-rays were taken and got the images in 15 minutes. They sent them to my doctor and gave me a backup CD. The doctor never checked to see if those X-rays of my finger had come in. She was too busy making her daily rounds.
Her next step was for my doctor to refer me to a specialist, but after a week of phone calls and prodding the girls who answer the phone at the front desk she still didn’t take the time to find me a specialist to set my finger. The answer always was she is very busy with other patients and will get back to me as soon as she possibly can. She never did.
I found a hand specialist on my own through a group that did back surgery on me. This was overall a painful affair. Luckily the hand specialist had a cancellation and a couple of days later he numbed my finger up and cracked it back in place. But, it took too long. It's been almost several months now and my finger is still swollen and stiff. It’s set back in place, but it will never be the same again because I waited too long.
Should I have bitten the bullet and gone off to the emergency room? Maybe so, but I wasn’t prepared to deal with a case of Covid-19 all over again, and at that time the threat was still there.
Will things get better in the medical profession? Nobody has a crystal ball but I don’t think so. As it splinters off into more and more specialties it may get to the point where a doctor is specialized to work on such a small fraction of the body it will keep you running from one clinic to the other.
Makes sense in a sick kind of way. As medical degrees institutions hand out degrees that narrow a doctor’s scope down to treat an ingrown toenail or fat lip, the concept of treating the body as a whole is lost. But that keeps that register ringing as you are hustled from one specialist to another. Everyone gets a piece of the pie. The real practice of medicine has been lost for a long time now and I don’t think it is ever coming back.
We are left with charlatans and the neighborhood cannabis store to keep us in a happy little cloud of complacency. Or you could become a medical crusader. If I could I would show you how to do it but that’s not my department.
Everyone treat your body right and stay away from doctors and hospitals as much as you can. It gets harder as you age. Walk for at least 30 minutes a day. A little exercise raises the immune system protecting and strengthening the body.
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