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THE INCREDIBLE STATUS QUO -- A PERSONAL STORY -- A HEART MATTER -- SKYDIVING AND BLINDNESS IN 2004 ______________________________________________________________________________
Vera
de Talleyrand-Perigord (about 1800 a. d.): The most lucrative of all
trades would be to buy people for what
they are worth and sell them for what they think they are worth. THE INCREDIBLE STATUS QUO The variously self-described democratic/capitalistic/private medical organizations now claiming to offer a better solution than socialized or otherwise nationalized systems failing worldwide are becoming unintended Trojan horses of the socialized systems to convert t America to socialized medicine. Just as the capitalistic/democratic system accepts the metaphoric premise that "the customer is always right", the American medical industry should have accepted that "the patient is always right". Instead, they have dangerously herded the patients and even the physicians to serve corporate imedical interests, without the two essential metaphoric guidelines: "THE PATIENT IS ALWAYS RIGHT" and "THE DOCTOR IS THE FREE ENTREPRENEUR". As in the case of the customer, the patient is "always right " primarily in his independence of choice, demanding unconditional attention, authority and respect from the doctors, their staff and related bureaucrats not less respect than what the doctors require. If the moral, ethical and professional motivations were not enough for the cynical and/or under-educated, the crude fact that the patient pays and suffers should suffice... -----------------------------------------
From the "Wall Street Journal" of June 26, 2003:
A research (according to one of the largest studies of medical records) by the Rand Corporation, a non profit organization based in Santa Monica, California, published in today's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded: "Patients receive the proper diagnosis and treatment for a broad spectrum of diseases only about 55% of the times" (no mark of less than 90% proper diagnosis and treatment is considered acceptable). This 2-year Rand study, costing $6.5 million .... scrutinized the screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up care of 30 conditions - including asthma, back pain, headache, several forms of cancer, diabetes, alcohol dependence, hypertension and sexually transmitted diseases.... 13,000 patients were interviewed, and 6,712 of them had their medical reviewed to produce the findings." "...Within that group, 1% of participants received care that wasn't recommended or was even potentially harmful. Some asthma patients, for instance, were put on heart medication that could seriously hamper their lung function..." said Dr. Elizabeth A. McGlynn, the study's lead researcher.
That is only a small part of what the study revealed, and not the worst. The study was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and grants from the U. S. Department of Veteran Affairs
In the same W. S. Journal issue and page, there is an equally impressive article about the necessity of making available free to the public the results of important medical and scientific research (costing about 50 billion yearly, funded by the American taxpayers) . Such information is only available at enormous cost to very few chosen purchasers (examples: "Brain Research", published by Reed Elsevier for $19.971.00 a year, Journal of Radio analytical and Nuclear Chemistry, by Walters Kluver NV for $7.540.00, and others available only to very wealthy organizations). "American taxpayers have been spending billions of dollars every year on basic research, and (since journals do not pay authors, who are happy to obtain professional recognition and prestige), "the results are just given away to publishers who have monopoly control" . Only now open information access to the public seems to be considered in some cases like the free (no charge) availability of the New England Journal of Medicine on line in 120 economically disadvantaged countries.
From "Business Week", issue "To Cut Or Not to Cut?", July 7, 2003:
"Are surgeons too quick to put patients under the knife?"
It is a fact that "the most common procedures are also the
most expensive.... A urologist is more inclined to recommend surgery for
prostate cancer, while a radiotherapist is likely to tell you to have
radiation.... an orthopedic surgeon will lean toward back surgery for disk
compression, while a sports medicine doctor will more often advise physical
therapy..." "If coronary bypass surgery cost $500, you can bet doctors
wouldn't be doing so many of them" says Cherles Inlander, president of the
People's Medical society, a consumer group in Allentown, Pa.
The medical profession's profuse statements that doctors always inform the patient that those operations and their alternatives are always his totally independent and informed choice, not the doctor's, is cynically misleading. Even in my totally unneeded coronary bypass operation case, no one ever told me that the alternative was an appropriate diet (I had no idea that it was so), exercise, or whatever. The number of unneeded hysterectomies, cesarean section deliveries and countless unneeded intervention instead of the less expensive and more reliable procedures would would make an incredibly large and bleak list... As to the patient's ability to make a wise choice after being informed, it is very difficult to be sure that he could be able to do it without a complete course in anatomy, pathology, metabolism, catabolism, cardiology, etc. etc.
Indeed, the "modern" system of practically eliminating the traditional "family doctor" from the present pattern, in favor of the "managed medicine" (or let's call it whatever else), in which the patient is responsible even for choices only doctors could make (how come the patient signs everything and the doctors, paramedics, nurses, secretaries, and countless other participants in the process sign nothing?).
In the face of my last bypass surgery, my family doctor passed me to the
cardiologist, and the cardiologist to the surgeon without contacting me again. A dedicated family doctor, who knows me medically, socially and personally would have told me what choices I had and could have advised me upon his knowledge of the total person I believe I am. Moreover, he would have explored my chest, listened to my heart and found out that the pain I had felt in the chest was from a healing rib broken in a car accident, which he could have known about by talking with me instead of just reading charts filled by lower-competence persons who had just asked questions without explaining what they really meant... I hope I made it clear. A PERSONAL STORY
Three of the most impressive causes of the present
medical crisis are:
I think they will prevail ultimately, not immediately.
Most physicians know it, and they may have the necessary
cultural level, but they are overwhelmed by a "practical"
minority with a financially dominant business specialization. Examples from the past: In
about 1946-1947 Naples, Italy, for instance,
a doctor treated me by massaging my feet with a then fashionable mercury paste presumed to cure a
“nerve trouble” (that later disappeared without trace), as if it were from syphilis,
although all tests (Wassermann's) were negative, but the pet assumption
of the time was (later proven false at least in my case) that anyone could have stages of syphilis
(like the dreaded "third") no test could detect.
Shortly thereafter, in Hoechst, Germany, while i was working in a research
institute, a
physical checkup at work suddenly decided that I needed emergency
appendectomy.
I made it just in time for a date I didn’t want to miss, and we had a lovely time that even the slightest abdominal irregularity could not have allowed.
The above are only two of the “cute” examples of numerous experiences I and others had long ago with respectable misinformed physicians who do not represent the many competent and trustworthy practitioners.
Those are among the few cases that make waves, and the politicians pick them as fitting their purposes. As usual, the good physicians are taken for granted, but not listened to, and ignored.
The more a competent
doctor or scientist knows, the more he recognizes his limitations. The ignorant and presumptuous are too often prone to blunders and defensive pomposity that go on the public stage and on records with undeserved authority.
The AMA and other interests tend to hide the reality from us because those who need -or think they need- organized protection are afraid not to include the undeserving majority in that fragile fortress that depends on their voting number and contributing fees. Just like the labor unions, who must include undeserving workers' votes to protect also the deserving.
Coming to examples of after 1980, we have intensified hints of unwitting socialized medicine Trojan-horsing in USA. A few years ago, I was unexpectedly railroaded into open-heart surgery, although I was jogging 3.5 miles daily and felt greatest. The night before surgery I jogged about 4 .5 miles, to make my point, and felt greatest too.
Unexpectedly, I found myself in bed with tubes coming in and out of my body… After this surgery and recovery, evidence popped that my chest pain that led the cardiologist to diagnose me wrong was only from healed broken ribs caused by an accident (a taxicab had hit me while I was walking in Chicago).
Coincidental (?) pettiness happened after I complained and changed doctors.
A medical receptionist, for instance, adamantly rejected me because I refused to describe my
symptoms loudly with a listening crowd waiting behind me. Later, a clerk’s refusal to schedule urgent help, or at least accepting an encounter with my physician, made me cancel an important business trip to Holland.
Incongruously, a self important physician's wife in our neighborhood switched to ostentatiously ignoring my wife when meeting on the street..., as if my wife (an attorney) had performed unnecessary and crippling surgery on her or her husband... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Passing to the general matters, we are not allowed to choose a physician, or
talk with him/her, or request references or his background previous to an
appointment, during which we are swallowed into depersonalizing
routines before we can talk with the doctor.
Paramedics or receptionists choose a doctor for me. And that's it.
Harbinger of a push toward socialized medicine, notwithstanding the official assurances to the
contrary?.. Finally, since socialized medicine physicians are on fixed salaries, their choice of procedures, treatments, surgery, medications are virtually free of greed motivation (which private medical enterprise will contrive to exploit to the hilt) . --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I go to the appointment, and busy assembly-line people process me. They shuffle papers and assume they find out from them and my improvised and uninformed scribblings, what I am there for. I get somebody's peremptory written instructions and sign papers with sneaky small print that I cannot read in the allotted time. Medics and paramedics sign nothing.
My questions are ignored, or silenced with pamphlets which answer questions posed by them for he patient, not by the patient.
I am refused service unless I publicly (without privacy) reveal my birth date, insurance card, driver license, social security, and whatever no-nonsense clerks fancy, even when I go to a hospital-owned shop to get an earplug for my swimming, in spite of my cash payment. They become routinely hostile if the patient cannot endure their obtuse obstructionism. They are presumably instructed to do so. Those we should complain to are conveniently behind the usual bureaucratic obstacles.
I go for a test and the records falsely show that I have high blood pressure (mine has always been the most monotonously normal blood pressure). That raises the question: how many wrong, damaging or nearly fatal prescriptions, treatments, medications have hurt me (or anyone else) on how many false diagnoses?
The record is corrected only when I am forced to fight their smug
browbeating that I should not dare to think I know more about my own permanent body
(which I have owned, and been prisoner of, since January 1st, 1924) than they
(nurses, paramedics, receptionists, etc.), who have never seen me before. The
patient doesn't even deserve personal attention as a human being: only his
papers exist, not matter how incompetently filled by whom... Other doctors found that I was allergic to wheat and milk (wrong). Doctors who also judged my heart surgery unnecessary recognized all three mistakes.
Local influential people and a head pharmacist had warned me to avoid choosing a physician or family doctor in my town. This happens now in many towns, because pernicious doctors keep contaminating the reputation of good doctors nationwide.
I made the first doctor appointment in my next town through a girl at a desk in a hall of a medical center without the possibility of choosing, seeing or talking with the doctor first. It was for not less than 2 months later. One day before that date, I was called and told that he went on vacation and would come back in one and a half month... Probably, he never knew anything about it. I am sure it was a nurse , receptionist or paramedic irresponsibility or mistake.
I went to another doctor, specifically as a family doctor.
Is the family-doctor idea extinct?
The doctors and the managers explain how they have good reasons for the above "inconveniences".
Their wrongs always have “good reasons”.
It is the cumulative barrage of smug
opaque explanations that outrages the patients.
Hillary Clinton glorified European nationalized medicine, but
not the drama of a superbly competent executive lady I had hired to help me in
London, England, who couldn’t come to America to work with my company, because she was
"doomed with terminal cervical cancer".
Philosophical, humorous, cynical, pietistic or other explanations sound tawdry...
Receptionists and other unqualified people make fatal decisions that only
a competent doctor-patient encounter should make. I was dizzy, 8 hrs before an October flight to Frankfurt/Main, Germany. In the local hospital's emergency room (otherwise my family doctor organization wanted me to wait 4-6 days), I was told to cancel the trip and stay in the hospital for heart and ears examination (later I found out that that was not the trouble at all). Seeing that some paramedics (or whatever they are) could make such decisions without doctor consultations, next time I decided on my own and departed anyway, for my airplane tickets and a host of business commitments in Germany, Netherlands and Italy were irrevocable.
In Bologna, Italy (plagued with socialized medicine), my dizziness
recurred and I went to an emergency place, where they confirmed the previous
diagnose, plus a pierced eardrum (wrong), critical whatchmacallit condition and sent me
to the hospital. A pretty streetwise nurse suggested me to go back to my hotel, and return in an ambulance to get prompt service. (She recognized it was silly, "...but you know how it is, people who make the rules fall into their own traps..." ).
I did, it functioned, but the wait
still became not less than “2-3 hrs”. I decided to risk it on the work ramparts rather than on a socialized stretcher. I just went back to where I could pay just in time the local help I had employed for my current business project.
2 days later, I managed to find a doctor who could give me a full
examination in his private office (so, some private doctors could still work in
Italy, where, traditionally, nothing is absolute, because nothing is taken too
seriously...). refuse
A businessman from Vladivostok, Siberia, calling from Boston
(no, I didn't know that, and why, he was in Boston) was on the phone with a question about his itinerary where to meet me, and to
decide on it, then and there, on a certain choice to communicate to his travel agent…
I wanted to change it and didn't know how else to schedule……
[I mention events in foreign places because they stand out as such and are remembered better. The same events and more happen locally, but they appear like dull, forgettable daily drudgery.]
I called the doctor again, and a mellifluous lady
voice says:”…your call is very important to us…” [4, 5 minutes...].
Later, I requested a talk with the medical laboratory supervisor and got to
her office (I presume), after she tried to dispatch me pompously in the hall.
She patiently explained, with priggish smugness: “…Oh no. No voice mail, no answering machine. Have you any idea of the legal troubles, if someone leaves a message and dies before we call back? No way!...” Great: warpath protection of the doctor against the patient, who unknowingly becomes the enemy by definition.
Seek a new doctor who is independent of such organizations
(who are they?) and ask for recommended names?
Sure: legal problems overrule any human and health problem.
Medical decision or policy? We don’t need the Hippocratic Oath to understand what should be going on.
Months later, my family doctor gave me the phone numbers of
two gastroenterologists (each in case the other one could not take new patients)
to call for a colonoscopy. I knew none of them, nor did they know me. I called two of them, and they knew nothing of that black list and could see me if I wanted... That self-important silly woman decided for them and for me, without caring and understanding whether my case was urgent or serious.
Have those doctors become such insignificant domesticated
wimps led by such self-important damsels?
"Could you send me the list of those doctors, so that I won't bother them?" "Well, sure, but it will take a week..." . "I will be glad to wait". 3 years or longer have passed. No list, no communication. It was to give me a lesson, I guess... Because of the arcane rules (never sufficiently revealed to the patients) of the System, I could only find a doctor about 70 miles away, and I decided to wait longer, unless it got still worse.
Now, what if my case required urgency? A lawyer would suggest
criminal irresponsibility due to vindictive pique for my not treating those rare
but obstreperous medicoids like
gods. Suddenly (with neither the slightest warning nor asking for my side of the story), my family doctor writes that he withdraws his medical services from me (and the rest of my family?) because of my "rude behavior" with his office. Which is totally untrue.
He was never present when I dealt with his staff and I was
never rude to them. If he had warned me, he would have had to retract everything and face the truth.
Fact: both the laboratory manager and that doctor declared that they dropped me without referring me to somebody else -despite my requests- explains quite a lot.
*************************************************
Just for the record, consider:
That laboratory perpetrated a cynical tort by: (1)refusing services I was paying for; (2) arbitrarily putting me on a medical black list because I questioned their behavior (they refused to let me leave an urgent, harmless request for help, when there was no one else I could talk to); (3)refusing to accept answering machine messages; (3) constantly refusing to let me talk with the doctor; (4) seriously swelling my arm by using incompetent personnel to take blood specimens and scoffing at my complaint; (5) browbeating me for asking questions about where else I could obtain medical service.
Add to it my unneeded surprise-heart-operation... This could be more than a borderline case for malpractice. For that, however, should I first die or be permanently disabled?. *************************************************************** May I say that it was they who had been rude, harmful and cynically irresponsible? What I have written above is so much that it looks like exaggeration only because other patients are resigned. Was the doctor scolded by the lab silly girl for giving me two names of gastroenterologists without asking for her permission?
Another day, he was visibly irritated when I described that an expensive daily pills ($3.00 each, that had no effect on me for 4 months) started to work only after I followed the manufacturer's instructions instead of his. He scoffed in a visibly contained tantrum at what I said and showed indifference for what I went through in the worsening situation.
It remains that:
The patient must sign everything to their defense against him.
What if I didn't understand, or if the doctor and I need a conversation
to find out just what we are talking about? Often, they consider the problem solved by just venturing a diagnose, without even thinking of giving at least a tentative prognosis.
Another possible reason was his hostility about my amusement about his opinion that the city of Florence (in Italy) "..needs a coat of paint" (his wife told me so). I thought he was joking and that I was laughing WITH him... He openly displayed indifference toward my medical problems, as if his obligation were to the abusive office girls rather than to his patients... But I trusted he would be professional.
I always had excellent professional and family relations with my previous physicians and their families, all my life and everywhere (in 3 continents), until my last unneeded heart surgery was unmasked. My unforgivable sin was that I expressed my disappointment about being unnecessarily victimized with the incredible blunder of an evidently unneeded major life/death surgery.
It still remains that a direct patient-doctor phone conversation has become virtually impossible.
A new angle: "...If it is a life threatening emergency, call 911". Thus: If your medical problem can wait, call the doctor.
If it is urgent, call the cops... Or "press 1 if...; press 2 if...; press 3 if...". Do you remember what "press 2" meant, when they are still describing about pressing 5, 6, etc...?. And wait..., wait... only to hear, "Your call is important to us..." (public relation), and wait further 4, 5, or more minutes..., we hope you give up bothering us...
Then, if you go to the emergency department:
They sign no guaranty
that the prices and tests meet an undescribed standard we cannot understand if
described...
Ever got those bills weeks or months later, without any explanations what those charges and code numbers mean? Ever try to ask the highfalutin frosty ladies (sometimes gentlemen) to explain? Hire a lawyer? Define the problem? "You have signed, haven't you?" That's it.
Unless the salivating lawyer sees a class action bonanza. That proves that they have a good reason to do the wrong thing. What could be worse than having a good reason for doing the wrong thing?
You had no alternative and there was pain,
suffering, helplessness, consternation...
Those medicos are as safe as imaginable.
I deal with the doctor but I pay the corporation he/she works for,
not him/her.
"Those are the rules, you know, and I don't make them". The same as in card game, with rules revealed after the game. They blunder, damage the patients irreversibly, and the patient pays just the same. Those are the rules. If the patient is exasperated, sick, suffering and consequently doesn't react the way that pleases the doctors and paramedics and parawhatever (all of them of course irreprehensibly competent, full of holy integrity) it is expected that they would help him out of his desperation...
Instead of helping the suffering patient, which is the first and total purpose of their profession, they punish him for not asking and behaving in a way that pleases them. That is the ugliest problem of today's medical world.
Courts? Just for one patient? It must be a class action or an iron-clad case...
Then, the corporation, the doctors and the lawyers litigate
about the patient, like cattlemen over a cow. How much percent do I get if my lawyer wins? The question becomes; DOES THE PATIENT PAY THE DOCTOR (really: doctor's employer) OR THE LAWYER?
Those who blame the lawyers play into the hands of the medical corporate exploiters. And the lawyer's gets the blame twice.
Besides, what ghost of a chance does a patient (who doesn't
die before they return the call...) have without a
lawyer?
Long ago, I offered to write a column about
the above problems. They might as well tell my dog he cannot write about his veterinarian. True: Gucci (my Schnauzer) doesn’t even know how to spell.
What about doctors who don’t pay real personal attention and
leave before you finish describing whatever is not in the chart (written by a
nurse or a para-medic or para-something, while you are on their running conveyor belt) he is reading?
Then, it has become the norm: the organization presumably warns the doctor not to get "personally involved" with the patient. It might slant and foul up something like a misfitting tongue depressor stuck between tonsils (they can do anything). I'll never invite that doctor again to join the other doctors at my birthday party.
Do I think chemists are better? The trouble is that a medical doctor needs more cultural literacy with his patients than a chemist with his chemicals and instrumentation. It just happens, however, that my chief chemist is culturally literate... But that is due to his personal interest, not to his medical curriculum or to the A.M.A.
I still cringe if a somebody presumes to take
charge of my health by just looking at a chart put together by indifferent
paramedics, nurses and whatever they are. The good paramedics and nurses don't
count, because the System, like any union, aims to please the numerous incompetent ones first,
in order to get enough voting power. Not the questioning and suffering patient; especially if he has been the owner and prisoner of his body for 80+ years (since 1924 a. d.), like me.
To top it all, it is the patient who pays for everything, even
for the damages or much worse- caused to him by incompetent or
cynical errors.
The bureaucratic Moloch is taking over medicine, and medical
sycophants are its high and low priests. With socialized medicine taking over in Europe, we must probably wait for their total collapse and recognition that they are on a self-destructive course, unless they find a balanced human approach, which should be obvious (beside the fact that we want the independent doctors in charge again and in direct contact with the patients). In a couple of years or generations?.. Over whose dead body?
Or should I advocate socialized medicine,
because the defensive smugness of our empowered paramedics, receptionists,
appointment bureaucrats, and other insiders may become still worse ? By the way, could I know in advance what they (hospitals, medical corporations, doctors, nurses, etc.) are going to charge me?
What about giving me a quotation? Why don't physician offer their services on a competitive basis? "Who do you think we are? Merchants? We are a healing science, not a business that bases everything on money". Well, the patient is not even admitted if he doesn't show his health insurance card and other financial information and commitments, and succulent money... Further awareness of what to expect is in a nebulous stage of disorientation.
Curing with appropriate food rather than with medicine should be the solution. Medicines are concentrated unnatural food substitutes offering irresistible profits to the pharmaceutical industry, with fattening credit to the doctors, adding no guaranty to the patient. Yet the patient pays with his money and body for everything and everybody who profits. Nutrition, metabolism and reliable digestive solutions? It is alarmingly remarkable that physicians relegate the task and responsibility of instructing their patients about the basics and intricacies of nutrition to a "lesser class" of "dieticians... To wit: the embarrassing diatribes among physicians and nutritionists about duets for almost any purpose.++ We hear impressive statements about our being what we eat, but medical science cannot clearly understand and connect nutrition with directing and controlling -as it should- our various health needs, even intelligence, personality traits (yes, even they have physical down-to-molecular connections) memory, metabolism-catabolism balance and basic problems that offer the same kind of incongruous puzzlement as knowing how to carve a brain tumor and looking at the common cold as if it were a Sphinx. Inventing medicines as pills or whatever is only a very poor and risky substitute (but eminently profitable for the pharmaceutical industry) for the appropriate foods that would obtain the truly acceptable results. The trouble is that we still don't know the pertinent attributes and functions of the appropriate foods for each purpose. Unfortunately, the profit motivation works against any competent research about intelligent nutrition.
We are still at a level where Aspirin (just acetylsalicylic acid) keeps coming back like the
legendary Phoenix.
Then, some researchers discover that Aspirin can save the life of
heart patients, and the same pharmaceutical pundits pontificate that the Aspirin
content of their products is a great scientific achievement proudly nurtured by
their assiduous, indefatigable research and sustained by their never diminished
faith in Aspirin
Our rudimentary knowledge of cholesterol, fats, proteins, carbohydrates, brain cells, vitamins, anti-oxidants, hormones, spermatozoa, bacteria (friendly or lethal) etc. go up and down like stock market follies...
Nutrition science claims to have entered the space age when it has merely begun to understand that the wheel must be round rather than triangular, without yet mastering how to turn it in what direction.
Diets show alternating results on the medical charts like weather forecasts (USA has the highest obesity percentage of on Earth). ***/ Read what a pop-can discloses about its contents: "carbonated water, caramel color, aspartame, phosphoric acid, potassium benzoate (preserves freshness), citric acid, natural flavors": each one of them could be in the formula in as many different variations as offered in the calculus of combinations and permutations. How many have been tested completely for various (countless, really) concentrations, effects on known and unknown functions, etc. etc.? And what about some of the other countless acidic substances, or glycols, alkalis, hormones, enzymes, bacteria, and whathaveyou of the other whathaveyous?...
The conundrum is still undefined and indefinable. Every day, week and year of such uncontrolled and uncontrollable intakes, gigantic corporations and dignitaries and politicians assure us that we have the best and safest nutrition in the world.... Really? If yes, at what price and sacrifice?
Plenty of untested cancerous results can be directly or indirectly
caused by untested reactions and/or catalysis by undetectable quantities of those
substances as ingredients and/or additives in solid or liquid foods, flavors,
beverages, etc..
Try to ask them, for instance, whether and what difference in harmful cholesterol (you know, there is good cholesterol too) there is between raw eggs, and fried eggs, French fries, scrambled, poached, hardboiled and otherwise prepared eggs. No doctor or nutritionist I asked could answer.
How many can perform a complete metabolism analysis that gives
real practical answers about what to eat for a precise result? No money back guaranty, let alone damage compensation. Over our dead bodies...
Some "diagnosis" are abundantly available and presumably
indisputable, especially when they vaguely mention the many possible
developments and dangers "in the case that...".
Patients (doctors also become patients) are a very dangerous and ruthless species
indeed.
Combine this kind of “science” with the arrogance of bureaucrats and vested interests who don’t want to confront the facts, and you have the usual yo-yoing for whatever we thought we could achieve and become.
We could try to raise awareness and spread it until
most minds are opened to corrective action.
The one hundredth monkey must say it louder.
[Check the "hundredth monkey"
chapter in this website]
In capitalistic democracy, personal and/or corporate profit marginalizes
or even forbids the needs of "others" in a free competitive adversary
system.
All we can do in this incessant struggle is lose our
individuality in some depersonalizing ("protecting") association or union.
Checking or grading their special competence
is forced into the unacceptability of comparing their humanity.
Plenty of competent physicians are eager to raise the situation to a dignified level, as soon as they are allowed the freedom to do so. Before or after my death?
A HEART MATTER
One night, at age 48 (1972), I had an unprecedented chest pain that scared me. Heart? My wife urged me to see a doctor, against my objections that there was no heart problem history among my known paternal and maternal ancestry of about 3 centuries. But I went to my doctor, a dear family friend, who forwarded me to a cardiologist. Angina pectoris (far less than a heart attack).
They found I had plenty of cholesterol clogging my vascular
system, due to my unrestricted eating and smoking.
Nonsense, because my financial obligations were higher than
ever before. Still many hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay back to banks. More to
suppliers. Not to mention the I.R.S. (they can destroy you with their kind of
"due process" if you don't pay). Since the descriptions of my ailment looked like a vascular plumbing problem, I asked whether medicine had the equivalent of a chemical or mechanical unplugging means.
My doctor said he only knew of "coronary bypass", a surgical
bypassing of my clogged heart artery and/or vein by cutting a section from an
artery (or vein?) in my left leg and inserting it from the sound part of a heart vessel
directly into the heart (well, sort of).
So, after I signed all kinds of papers (as I said, doctors and paramedics signed nothing), they operated successfully, I stopped smoking and started a regime of swimming, jogging and other exercises.
I also adopted the then almost unknown "Dr. Atkins diet"
(almost only proteins and fats, no carbohydrates, sugar, alcohol etc.), which alone reduced my
cholesterol below normal, while I devoured about 3 eggs, meat, fish, fat and
other non-carbohydrates daily.
Happily healthy jogging and swimming thereafter. As I frequented several doctors and their families socially, I was told by some that my operation had been in all probability unnecessary, or at least too hasty. However, I didn't care because I felt healthy and could work and exercise without restraint, and better than ever before.
As I wrote before, one morning, at age 73, I felt a pain in the chest. Not too bad,
but the precedent of my heart surgery 23 years before prejudiced me. I called my new doctor (all I knew of him was that he spoke an almost flawless "Hochdeutsch" German with me), who send me to a cardiologist. Tests found nothing wrong, he concluded. Almost one month later, I got a surprise call from a hospital: they had made an urgent appointment for a heart bypass surgery.
I was shocked. All my life, I was accustomed that my family doctor would follow the matter and guide my steps with his advise, instead of forgetting me after passing me to the specialist. Only now family doctors , or "internists", limit their activity to almost that of a medical traffic cop: he gives you addresses of specialists you don't know and cannot interview in advance, and you go there and there, and they will take over completely (I want to hope it is not the general rule...) Then, they discuss the patient among themselves as if he were a pet who wouldn't understand...
I was disgusted enough to dismiss my internist and the cardiologist for not having warned me, but I was too scared to refuse the surgery appointment.
It just happens that the medicos are to be worshipped; even the incompetent ones who wrong you... Since I was jogging and swimming almost every day, I decided to jog also the night before the operation for 4.5 miles. I did, and I felt great.
The following morning, I went with that evidence to the
hospital for the bypass surgery, with the hope that it would convince the
surgeon to cancel or at least postpone the operation. I met a whole team waiting for me. That was only one of the scheduled operations. Quantity increases the profit by distributing the concentrated effort... That allocates the savings to the medical organization (not to the patient...).
They were too much in a hurry to let me talk before they
prepared me for the surgery. So, I started to tell my story -also in a hurry- to convince them that the operation was probably not needed. One of the injections (I found later) they gave me was the anesthetic... As if by magic, I found myself lying with tubes coming into and out of my body. Done!
Later, the surgeon, who had operated on the basis of the cardiologist's diagnosis and prognosis, felt he had to tell me that the operation had been "not urgent", which was the typical euphemism for "unnecessary", in that case.
He had found it out only while operating... He had taken another blood vessel section from the other leg and unnecessarily inserted it like the other one of 23 years before. How do I measure the consequences? I am working to overcome them, as usual.
And I will.
In spite of all. The doctor only comes to repeat what his helpers have told him about me, which is too often based on my medically incorrect statements in the forms I have filled and signed in a hurry, without enlightening tutoring that only physicians and lawyers could provide.
Why should they worry? The responsibility is mine and only mine.
No sense blaming the doctor: he may lose his job if he doesn't lockstep with the
others... But my last doctors went too far. Ethics, I.Q., some psychosis? Plans to buy a new Mercedes Benz?
What about the pain I had felt in my chest? My family doctor reproduced it inadvertently by pressing a finger in that one spot on my chest after the surgery: it was exactly merely a spot where a rib was healing, which had been broken when a taxicab hit me in Chicago's Wabash Street. "That couldn't have possibly come from the heart." he remarked. That's all, folks.
That is, the costs (and the damages) are spread nationwide.
Well, we all have to die; and our politicians listen and grab whatever reelects them...
(to be continued) ...................................................
SKYDIVING & BLINDNESS IN 2004
January 1st 2004: my 81st birthday. Copyright © 2002-2004 by John J.P. Caporaso "http://www.higheryet.com/"'s contents are
provided 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. 1. All text must be copied without modifications and all pages must be included. 2. All copies must contain the date on top of the document and the John J.P. Caporaso copyright notice at the end. 3. The above writing may not be distributed for profit.
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