I’ve become really disillusioned with what a clunky clusterfuck modern medical practice is, over the past year.
I’m not even talking about insurance or coverage or paying it, just the straight-up standard infrastructure of seeing a doctor, being referred to other doctors or specialists, getting tests done and learning the results of those tests, etc.
It’s like it’s designed to be as herky-jerky and inefficient as possible. Everyone says something that contradicts the next guy - I used to trust “Modern Medicine” and now I feel like it’s one step removed from psychiatry, in that everyone seems to believe different things. No practitioners communicate amongst themselves, so my specialist is trying to order tests done that I’ve just had done with my GP and it’s right there on the chart that my GP sent over.
Everything’s really “amateur hour” in that you see amazing fuck-ups CONSTANTLY - nurse recording the wrong weight when she weighs me (off my 50 pounds - do I look like I weigh 125?!), Doctor grabbing the wrong chart for me (different sex, age, name, everything…), Doctor writing a prescription MG that would be so small (by a factor of 100) as to have absolutely no effect. It seems like everyone just got out of some sort of community college “be a nurse 2day” night school and nobody knows their ass from a hole in the ground about anything. The scary part is it makes me wonder about the fuck-ups that I DON’T catch.
And everything takes FOREVER. EVERY doctor is always “not back in until next tuesday.” EVERY specialist is always already full this month, and booking halfway through the month after that. EVERY test result takes three fucking weeks to come back from the lab. It’s absolutely mindblowing.
If i ever get anything potentially fatal, I’m just going to cut my losses and stick a gun in my mouth, because I don’t have hope in these jokers getting their act together enough to actually fix me.
I’m going through the same thing. My Dr’s voice mailbox is always full, her nurse knows nothing. Trying to get a call back about the biopsy from a week-ago-last Monday, the very biopsy they left a useless message about on my phone last Friday has proved impossible. (yes, *three days *. I know this is not a long time, but If I’ve got esophageal cancer, I’d like to know as soon as possible, ok?).
Last year it took three fucking months to get my annual gyn exam, so this year I called three months in advance and was told, Oh, we don’t know anyone’s schedule yet. Try calling back next month. I am completely fed up with their constant game of phone-tag.
Oh god, you all have my sympathy. I had to doctor wrangle and chart rassle and ugh for 11+ years. No one listened, no one paid attention to their own notes, every doctor would say something different, the doctors would say “come back in X weeks” and the schedulers would say “We have an opening in X + 3 weeks…”
The worst moment was when one cardiologist told us something that contradicted what three or four other cardiologists had said. I asked, “Is that possible for you all to be right?” He said no, but then refused to talk about it further. It’s a miracle! Whee!
The thing is, I’m young and patient - I can deal with the waits and the red tape. What’s absolutely soul-crushing is the realizing that this grand, hallowed institution of Modern Medicine that I’ve always just sort of assumed was this amazing, infallible machine that would fix/save me if I ever got sick is basically this fumbling, bumbling Wal-Mart. We’re really one step above muti, aren’t we?
Basic mess ups aside (like writing your weight down wrong), diagnosing an illness of the human body is really hard. There’s only like a half dozen side effects of being sick, yet there’s thousands of potential illnesses it could be for any one combination of the present symptoms. It’s really just an odds game.
The up side is that modern medicine is provably better than any sort of medical care that’s ever existed before and provably getting better with each year. Eventually a machine will be able to take a sample of all your bodily fluids or scan your entire body and know exactly what you have. But unfortunately, that may still be a hundred years off.
Quick note–
Psychiatry is modern medicine. You must be thinking of phrenology, homeopathy, aromatherapy, iridology, or any number of other “alternative medicine” practices that have no basis in science.
Where to start? First, I’m fairly sure, not knowing anything about your doctor or his/her office, that you weren’t dealing with a nurse, as in RN or even LPN. You were most likely dealing with a med tech, some of whom are quite good and some (I’d say most, but I’ve had some bad experiences) are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. They don’t have much training (I’ve had med techs try to take my pulse and BP incorrectly, as well as try to “explain” my urine test to me–as in, after it came back + for glucose while I was pregnant, “oh, you probably just had tons of sugar at the Christmas party!”–no, I had gestational diabetes).
Second, the thing about docs not communicating is very true and aggravating as shit to most nurses (RNs). Also, the duplication of lab tests is a pet peeve of mine as a pt and as a nurse. Electronic records will help decrease some of this, but it will never completely go away.
I also dislike our system of reimbursing for expensive tests, rather than for sitting down with the pt and LISTENING to him or her. I heard on NPR last week (sorry, can’t remember the book title) about some studies that were done about how long docs listen to pt complaints. The average is 20 seconds, with some docs only listening for 3. Seconds–3 seconds. I’m not sure I can say a whole sentence in 3 seconds, unless it’s a shriek of “help! I’m dying!”
I don’t mean to dump on docs–they have their own frustrations with our current system. I don’t have any real answers, but you have my sympathy.
Part of your problem with the medical field is you don’t have a proper understanding of the dicipline. For example, they use specialized tools and terminology. Lots of expensive schooling is involved.
“We need to run some tests” could mean a number of things. “I have a Tee time to make and don’t want to deal with you now”, “The Lab I am a silent partner in needs some business and I have a boat payment due”. Its all in the context.
“Let me refer you to a Specialist!” may mean “My buddy needs money” or “I owe this guy, this will make us even”. See? Totally different thought process there.
Ok, I will expand. Name one thing about psychiatry that is falsifiable. There are no diagnostic tools or tests in psychiatry that conform to the scientific method. It is all the subjective opinion of the psychiatrist. Psychiatrists prescribe medications which even the manufacturers do not really know why they do what they do. And they have an efficacy rate that would be utterly unacceptable in any other medical discipline. Psychiatry is to medicine what astrology is to astronomy.
It is a little bit inconvenient that modern humor is based upon referencing things, because then if you don’t get the reference you miss the joke. I’d do something about that, but I don’t make the rules.
There are different sub-headings under psychiatry. Some of them are quite heavy science (brain and drug research, for instance.) Freudian stuff is, I believe, largely out of the system. What’s come in to fill it might not be based on anything deep, but I believe that it has been shown that people with a problem who have a psychiatrist do better than people who don’t, even if it’s essentially little more than having someone to talk with about private and emotional stuff.
I played this game for a year before frustration drove me to drive to another state where the doctors at the university hospital actually knew how to do the tests and the surgery I was pretty sure I needed before I even started the whole fucking runaround.
Medicine is not supposed to be a money making scam for the doctors, but it frequently is.
I’m guessing it was Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders (which I mention in case you had wanted to read it, eleanorigby). I heard half the interview while driving somewhere myself.
Yeah, the specialist is supposed to request clarification if needed and to send a report back when he’s done, that’s the reciprocity part. The GP shouldn’t need to call every single specialist any more than people writing, say, emails at work should call every recipient to make sure they’ve received, read and understood the email.
Heck, sometimes the doctors don’t even read the reports of the tests they ordered. We had a 18 month medical odyssey with a bump on my daughter’s neck. When she was about 9 months old we noticed a small bruise under her jaw. It didn’t go away so we asked the ped about it. “Probably a hemangioma. We will keep an eye on it but it should start to get smaller.”
Well, it didn’t get smaller so she referred us to a pediatric dermatologist. He wants to ultrasound. Do the ultrasound, doesn’t look like a hemangioma. He refers us to a pediatric ENT.
We go there. He looks at the ultrasound and starts telling us what a waste of time the ultrasound was and that we need a CT scan. We get the CT scan and he tells us it appears to be a lymph node. No NEED to remove it yet but just keep an eye on it. She probably doesn’t have cancer.
A little while later we ask her regular ENT who did her ear tubes for a second opinion and - WTF! - the radiologist report from the CT says nothing about a lymph node! Watchful waiting is again recommended unless we wanted to just have it removed for peace of mind.
At some point later the bump gets noticably bigger all of a sudden. The regular ENT does the removal and tells us it appeared to be a lymphatic malformation. The pathology comes back a few days later and what was it? A hemangioma, just like the pediatrician said. Gah!