What’s the straight dope on cell phones in doctor’s offices?
I recently went to visit my general practitioner and was amazed to see signs everywhere, especially in his waiting room, asking people to turn off their cell phone since it would interfere with their medical equipment. Excuse me? While it may be rude to talk on your cell phone in a small waiting room, saying that it will interfer with equipment is bogus. This study by the Mayo Clinic says there is no adverse effect of having cell phones around medical equipment.
I have a feeling that there are nervous lawyers behind all this since I can’t seem to find any real reason. Is this also a common practice in Europe and Asia? Anyone know?
There are two pieces of medical equipment which cell phone use regularly does interfere with: the doctor and the nurse.
That may sound like a flippant answer, but it’s really not. They’re on a tight timetable, and they need your undivided attention. If you’re gabbing away in the waiting room and do that “just a sec!” finger hold move while you finish your chat, you can put them 2-3 minutes behind schedule without trying. And then the next guy does it, and the next guy, and it’s a right bloody mess by lunchtime.
So then the doctor comes in, spends 12 minutes figuring out what’s going on with you, and has 3 minutes left to convince you to start eating right, exercising more and taking this complex regimen of pills, and suddenly your cell phone goes off and you hold him up *again *to tell your boss you’ll be 20 minutes late getting back to the office.
In hospitals, I’ve watched cell phone chatterers recalibrate monitors by leaning on them, occlude oxygen tubes by standing on them, get into the nurse’s way while she’s trying to take vitals and once, in a spectacular move right out of Naked Gun, collide with a couple of nurses wheeling a newborn premature infant into the ICU in an isolette, throwing the infant against the hard plastic wall of his incubator.
So yes, in terms of monitors and ventilators and machines that go BING, a cell phone itself won’t interfere. But a cell phone *user *certainly might. Take it to the hallway and for heaven’s sake, stand STILL!
If the equipment is not rated to handle typical radiation from cell phones, then its not bogus. Unless there’s been FCC testing on this equipment against all sorts of cell phones then its not safe.
Maybe tomorrow’s technology will be rated so its 100% safe to use around cell phones, but the current batch may not be and those stickers make both legal and technical sense, even though its unlikely any catastrophes will happen in a doctor’s office. Better safe than sorry.
Essentially this is the same argument as “why cant I use my phone on a plane.” Granted, the cell phone network isnt configured for high altitude talk and the phones cause havoc, but the shielding hasnt been tested with all modern cell phones and their various frequencies. The mythbusters were able to consistently show interference at 800-900MHz on instrumentation on a recent episode.
of course, they were 30 minutes behind schedule to start with, thanks to their very effed-up notion that every second of their day and all of their time has incalculable value whereas your time has zero, if not negative, value.
“They” never put anything behind schedule*. Patients put things behind schedule. Sometimes because they’re inconsiderate and sometimes due to actual medial need. And if you were the emergency patient with a wheezing child or a herniated disc or the mother whose blood pressure suddenly spiked, you’d be grateful they made everyone else wait 30 minutes while the doctor spent some extra time with you, too.
*Assuming you’re not seeing a doctor who routinely double books. And if you are, shame on you; take your business to someone who values it.
I’m pretty confident that doctors don’t schedule appointments with enough time to account for the real average length of time spent per patient or the odds that they will have emergency cases built up. They try to jam as many patients in as they can in a day, and the end result is that they invariably get off schedule very quickly.
I have never seen a doctor on time, ever. And the ones I go to aren’t cut-rate double-bookers, either. They’re chronically off schedule because they are trying to maximize revenue. Nothing wrong with that, but let’s not pretend that a cellphone wielding patient that takes an extra 20 seconds to walk from the waiting room to the door to the inner office because she had to end her cell phone call is what is responsible for throwing an entire schedule off keel.
Lots of hospitals and doctors offices do allow cell phone these days even in the ICU (I know this personally). However, it is extremely poor etiquette to use one while any medical professionals are around or near any patients that need care of their own. The doctors are there to help and patients don’t just come into a doctor’s office on a whim. Some of the situations are dire and the last thing they need is someone yapping away to their friend. I am sure your doctor’s office had some bad experiences with people using cell phones so that is the end of it. If you don’t like it, you need to find a new doctor.
Yes, that’s exactly my point. The schedule is tight. 20 seconds DOES matter, especially as it’s rarely only 20 seconds and it’s repeated and snowballs all day long if you let it. It’s not the *only *thing that throws off a schedule, I never said it was, but it’s certainly *one *thing.
My doctors are almost always on time down to the minute and I have several of them that I see often. I picked the best and most prestigious ones I could find and they live up to the promise. OTOH, I have discarded many others because they couldn’t get it together.
One time my vet made me wait 15 minutes extra when I took my dog in for a visit. Because of that they gave me a $10 credit on my bill. I would die of a heart attack if a Dr. ever did that.
Let’s say the office is open from 9-5 with a half-hour lunch break.
Let’s further say that the doctor schedules one patient per 15 minutes
So, if every patient spent an extra 20 seconds, the snowballing effect would be thus:
9:00 patient now seen at 9:00:20
9:15 – 9:15:40
9:30 – 9:31:00
9:45 – 9:46:20
10:00 – 10:01:40
so in one hour, the doctor has lost 1:40 seconds
by lunch time, he’s 5 minutes off. Wow. Color me unimpressed.
Of course, this resets after lunch, it doesn’t snowball all day because there’s a major break in the patient schedule…
I’d submit that the problem is inadequate provisions for scheduling the necessary time to see patients, not the imaginary problems of a cellphoned patient.
I’ve also heard ushers tell people to put their cell phones off at Broadway shows–not on silent but off, because of special effects/stuff backstage. Is that similar? (To the medical equipment, not to the issue of talking.)
I think what he’s picking a fight with is your claim that the doctors never put things behind schedule and it’s always the patients’ fault. It’s a pretty ridiculous and needlessly adversarial claim.
Its not about the medical equipment or special effects. That is just an excuse to get rid of a legitimate problem. People that walked around freely and talked out loud whenever and wherever they wanted used to be known as schizophrenics. Schizophrenics are still around but it much harder to identify them these days because teens, 20 somethings, and lots of others mimic the same syndrome.
These places make a note of saying that they can’t even be on vibrate or silent, though–they have to be off, which leads me to believe it is about more than just making sure people aren’t talking.
They just want to make the point perfectly clear. You shouldn’t be worried about your cell phone in a theater. Even a vibrating one causes some people to instinctively yank it out of their pocket or purse to look at the caller ID which is, in itself, mildly disruptive especially to those in adjacent seats who paid good money to watch the show.
Yes, doctors and staff DO think about the schedule all the time - it’s absolutely HUGE. Of course they overbook - it’s called money - but I guarantee you doctors would rather be late because they were seeing another patient than because they had to stand around waiting for a patient to wrap it up on the phone.
The cell phone ban is common sense - if you do it in the waiting room you annoy the other patients. If you do it in the exam room you risk messing up their flow.
