Time for a Rant

I’m fed-up with the medical profession. It seems like more and more, doctors and other medical professionals are treating patients and their families like crap. Thanks to medical insurance, which has practically destroyed the medical profession and reduced the quality of patient care to near nothing, we have to deal with doctors who refuse to admit mistakes, made ridiculous judgment calls and drag us from specialist to specialist when there’s nothing wrong with us in order to cover their butts from a medical insurance standpoint.

It’s getting to be disgusting.

This week, case in point. I took my children for their physicals on Monday and their blood work on Tuesday. On Wednesday I received a message from the doctor’s office saying there was an abnormality in my daughter’s blood work and I needed to call the office. Enter parent panic mode. I was out all day Wednesday and didn’t get the message until late at night, so I called first thing this morning to ask about the blood work. Of course no one could speak to me at the moment so I had to wait for a call back, which came of course while I was out at another appointment. The doctor left a nasty message telling me my daughter’s blood work was perfectly normal and there was no reason for me to call [EXCEPT THAT ONE OF HIS NURSES TOLD ME TO CALL.] I was livid at the tone of his message. As though I was some kind of nuisance. He repeated twice that I didn’t need to call, and that if something was wrong, they would call me. Well, duh. They DID CALL ME!

I called back and told the nurse I expected someone to inform the doctor that I was only following instructions and someone had called me in error. Do you think they even apologized for making an error? No. Never admit your mistakes, I suppose, is the credo of the medical profession these days. Being a writer, I fired off a two page letter of complaint and I don’t really care if they kick us out of the practice. I expect better treatment from a medical professional.

That said, this isn’t the first time we’ve been given the runaround. In addition to this mess, they also told me Monday that my daughter’s vision was a problem. She had a complete eye exam in October and everything was fine so when they told me her vision was 20/70 I got concerned, made another appointment with the eye doc who said not only is her vision 20/25, it’s better than it was in October.

I’m tired of hearing people get the runaround from their doctors, false information, bad medical advice. A friend of a friend was recently told her child had leukemia only to find out [and gladly so] the diagnosis was something much less serious. Another friend was sent to three different specialists to diagnose her son’s sinusitis because the original doctor couldn’t be 100% that was the problem. My husband’s doctor recently suspected he’d had a silent heart attack. He had to go to a cardiologist to be told his heart was perfectly healthy. I understand it’s better to be safe than sorry, but when someone’s medical condition is the issue, isn’t it better to be right than wrong? What happened to pride and efficiency?

It seems like doctors today are afraid to make a diagnosis. They can’t use their intuition anymore, so they need every diagnosis to be backed up by a specialist who invariably disagrees with their assessment. Who can you trust? The doctor who tells you you’d better go right to a specialist because you have a serious problem, or the doctor who tells you you’re fine and you have nothing to worry about?

Now I’m left wondering who is the patient with the abnormal blood work? Is there a child with a name similar to my daughter’s whose parents SHOULD have been notified but weren’t? Was the nurse who called wrong, or was the doctor? They said my son’s blood work was fine. Could they have been wrong about that, too?

I’m not a worrier – well, I’m the least worrisome of my family and friends who tell me I’m very calm in an emergency. I try to reduce stress by not fretting over things since I’ve learned that panic, worry, hysteria don’t help any situation. But now I have to keep in the back of my mind that doctors do make mistakes, far too often, and can we really be sure of anything they tell us?

End of rant.