Worst cell phone story I have heard so far was a guy who answered his phone and started talking in the middle of a funeral. But I guess somebody can top that.
Could be, but my money as a movie theater usher is that it’s just an excuse. When you tell people to put a phone on silent, a lot will just set it to vibrate, which is often pretty audible. And of course, silenced phones will often start to beep if their battery starts to die.
[edit: this was about the phones in theaters. That’ll teach me to answer the phone before hitting post!]
Until recently doctors didn’t use cellphones either, out of concern for the equipment. However I’ve seen a study that says that the benefits of doctors getting information about an issue faster than they could with a pager outweighed the slight danger of interference.
Besides the other good reasons given, I have another. People in a waiting room often aren’t feeling so great. The last thing they need is to hear some jerk yakking on a cellphone about his/her condition or sex life. Anyhow, if people spoke on their cellphones, the other patients wouldn’t be able to hear the Andy Griffith reruns that seem to be the fare on the TV in my wife’s retina specialists office. :rolleyes:
I make early appointments, and almost never have to wait. Sure, later in the day things happen, but I’m happy that when there is an issue the doctor will give you the time to explore it, and not race away because your 15 minutes are up.
My wife’s retina specialist often runs late - but when her retina detached, she got an emergency appointment and no doubt people had to wait for her. Therefore we don’t mind. Let’s keep our priorities straight.
I agree with you that schedule has nothing to do with the cellphone ban. Maybe it is more that when your health is at stake you should actually be there, not off someplace else arranging your very important dinner date.
Most people can quote experiences that come down on the side of the waiters and of the doctors. Obviously some doctors abuse their scheduling privileges, and some patients do too.
FWIW (i.e. a single datapoint) I am being treated for cancer at Boston Medical Center. My doctor’s waiting room has a prominent “NO CELL PHONE USE ALLOWED” sign. Many patients ignore it. This particular doctor has many many many patients (lined up out the door, sometimes) because a) he’s the best, and b) BMC as a whole has a well-deserved good rep, and c) BMC apparently doesn’t turn folks away for not having insurance, what with having a community mandate or whatever.
I’ve been waiting in his waiting room maybe half a dozen times, and waiting in the phlebotamists’ waiting room upstairs about that often. Not ONCE have I been there without someone’s yakking on their phone’s holding things up. Not ONCE have I been there without someone’s yakking on their phone’s being annoying and distracting and generally inappropriate. I generally wait less than half an hour each place, so by extrapolation it seems likely that someone’s yakking on their phone several times a day holding things up and annoying people.
It’s simple math: each doctor deals with many patients. Ask **all **patients to cut the phone crap, and each doctor’s personal hassle AND the hassle of all his or her waiting room patients decreases. Granted that phone use may or may not directly affect equipment; it’s given that phone use directly affects quality of life for the rest of us waiting.
Back in my private practice days, I had a patient answer her phone and start yakking in the middle of the appointment, as I’m trying to talk to her. After 30 seconds of this, I walked out and told her I’d be back after she was done talking.
About 35 minutes later I returned, and she was still talking. So I left again, and had my Physician Assistant work her into his schedule later that day. (It was obvious by the conversation that this was not an emergency call)
And I ran a pretty tight schedule back then. Most patients were seen within 10 to 15 minutes of their appointment time, many were seen early. A fair percentage showed up 10 to 15 minutes late for their scheduled appointments, too.
I don’t have cell phone problems in my office now. Any patient with a cell phone is grabbed by half a dozen security personnel and frogmarched down to the segregation unit, and given an orange jumpsuit.
I am hoping this trend catches on.
Its a fictional ruse to keep folks from annoying everybody else.
Keep the phone on silent and take actual calls outside, text were appropriate. Give it a couple more years and those signs should come down.
Declan
They don’t do it at all shows, though. They only did it at “Equus” which does have some special effects above and beyond the norm. That’s the only one I’ve been at where they had it anyway.
Cell phones were at one time routinely prohibited in hospitals and doctors offices because of the potential for interference with medical equipment, in particular ECG and EEG machines. This reason is alluded to in dolphinboy’s post, while everyone else but HorseloverFat seems to have missed this point, and assumes that doctors are prohibiting cell phones because they just don’t like them.
Have you ever left your cell phone turned on sitting next to unshielded audio or video devices that are also turned on? If so, you may have noticed that the cell phone’s signal will occasionally interfere with these devices, sometimes causing them to buzz or flicker, even if the cell phone is not being used. The same phenomenon has the potential to occur with sensitive medical monitoring equipment.
Let me be clear here: I am emphatically not saying that this interference will necessarily occur. I am merely giving a reason why doctors may choose to ban these devices in their offices, even if that reason is to prevent a situation which may never occur. As per dolphinboy’s link, there is reason to believe that cell phones do not, in fact, interfere with medical equipment. Other studies suggest that the potential for interference exists. Newer monitoring equipment is better shielded from electromagnetic interference, and newer cell phones emit less radiation, making the potential for interference very small.
I am not a mind reader. Perhaps a particular doctor hates cell phones and chooses to ban them for the reasons alluded to by many in this thread. But I think the real reason most doctor’s offices ban cell phones is to prevent the possibility of interference, whether real or imagined.
That’s untoppable, especially if it was the corpse doing the talking.
“Hello, it’s Mr. Gannet from Dorchester, isn’t it?”
For what it’s worth, I was asked not to use my cell phone in the NICU because some phones caused interference in the oxygen/heart rate monitors. Not all phones caused it and not necessarily consistently, but the policy was all cell phones needed to be off, and I had no problem with that.
I completely agree that having a cell phone interfere with interacting with the doctor is rude and unforgiveable. That being said, if I have to sit in the freaking OB/GYN exam room for fifteen minutes in a goddamn paper gown, you can bet the Tetris is coming out.
…And in *our *NICU, cell phones are allowed anywhere and don’t interfere with any equipment at all. Therefore, I can only conclude that equipment interference is not a realistic concern, and policies forbidding cell phones are due to other concerns or to fears not borne out by actual evidence. The Mayo Clinic study, published two years ago, bears this out - the significant (that is, patient endangering) interferences were zero percent. Zero! At least one person has mentioned “other studies” which allegedly show significant interference, but has been unable or unwilling to produce or cite them.
This is really old news guys, and stems from back in the day (early 2000s) when cell phones were becoming ubiquitous and people were still a little afraid of them. The last serious report suggesting cell phones might be a problem dates back to 2002. This isn’t even a concern to hospitals any more in any real sense, except that leaving the signs up is cheaper than paying someone to take them down, and cell phone users do tend to interfere with medical personnel anyway, so it does make things easier to discourage their use in hospital settings - but not really safer, because there was never any real danger to begin with.
(I’m trying to figure out why fighting this little bit of ignorance has me so worked up, and I think it has to do more with being a symptom of the idea that Doctor is God than anything else. That if there’s a sign in the waiting room, it must be absolutely literally true because God Doctor wouldn’t have anything there for His mere convenience, it must be because He knows more than the rest of us Plebes and has only our safety in mind. Bullshit.)
I haven’t seen a physicians office with a sign saying to turn off phones for medical equipment but have seen signs to turn them off to be considerate.
Patients will answer the phone in the middle of their exam and think nothing of carrying on a conversation while flashing the one minute signal to the doctor. I am not talking 20 seconds, I am talking time that another patient could be seen while patient one gabs away about what to get at the market or worse, their medical condition that they are trying to get explained right at the moment!
I do think the medical professionals should walk out and come back after the next patient.
That is the most refreshing optimism I’ve seen in a long time, thinking people will actually do that. Maybe people as smart as you are will think of being that considerate, but there’s that other 99% out there who you wonder how they manage to even feed themselves, much less be considerate to who? Others?
Hear Hear! (as a vet tech in an ER, I do this frequently, since people need to yap incessantly in spite of the signs posted asking them to shut it)
While recovering from g.b. surgery, I had my cell phone in my room next to my bed. I didn’t talk much–intubation is painful afterwards–but I did text as much as I was able. Why? People wanted updates, TV had nothing good on it, and roommate was semi-coherent at best. The nurses and everyone else who came in knew I had it and said nothing. I guess it was okay. I hope I didn’t harm anything.
Above all… it is simply exceedingly rude to transfer your attention from one individual to another during the course of a conversation, especially one that involves one’s health and well being, just to have a nugatory conversation on a cell phone. Try answering a cell phone in a courtroom while the judge is speaking.