When I was a child, doctors made house calls, and it was wonderful to see old Doc Sullivan walking into my bedroom with his black bag if I was sick. If he was called, it was always something serious. Like the first time, when I had blood poisoning at age 13, and penicillin was new on the market. He diagnosed my problem without a single blood test, And he cured me. Next time, I was 21, told him about dark urine, and he accurately diagnosed hepatitis A. The treatment consisted simply of home bed rest and a high carbohydrate diet. Within a few weeks, I was perfectly well. I wasn’t afraid of doctors then.
My latrophobia (fear
of doctors) started when I began having
scary mammograms that turned out to be false alarms. Besides several call
backs, and repeat mammograms, I had at least 4 biopsies. Now, my blood pressure (which had always been
low) would skyrocket each time I walked into a doctors office. Naturally , I’d be put on meds that brought my
blood pressure so low I nearly fainted,
because I didn’t have consistently high blood pressure to begin with. Always, my blood pressure zooms if I have to
see a doctor. My husband sees a lot of
doctors (fortunately he doesn’t have latrophobia
) and it seems to me that they often hit
the alarm button over some little symptom.
As an example, one night we went
to a 24 hour clinic for my husband’s dizziness, and the doctor suggested we go
to the hospital for a brain scan. Nope,
didn’t go, and the dizziness was gone by morning. That was five years ago. Overall. though, we can’t complain because he has some serious health issues and wouldn’t be alive if not for his doctors.
Obviously, the doctor – patient relationship changed when
malpractice suits became so popular in the 70’s that they ruined some doctors' reputations. Last week I read that a couple of doctors are
suing patients who gave them bad reviews on Yelp. And many hospitals email you a survey after each doctor visit , asking
your opinion of your doctor. How could
anyone evaluate a doctor based on one visit?
So now, doctors and patients are skittish unless they’ve
known each other for a long time. New statistics show that doctors only listen to their patients for 11 seconds! Doctors are leery of new patients, so they
order all kinds of expensive tests that scare
the patient to death, because they want to defend themselves against a lawsuit
in case something goes wrong. Something very sacred has been lost. My parents would never have dreamed of suing
old Doc Sullivan, even if I had died from blood poisoning. They knew he was
doing the very best he could, and that’s all that could be expected. Modern medicine has come a long way, but
sometimes, I wish we could go back to the old days.
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