Doctors and Dragons

My CT scan yesterday at Community Hospital was a breeze. I worried a lot about it prior to having it done, but there was no need.

I didn't require any kind of injections and I can't recall ever getting in and out of a medical facililty so quickly.

I blame my doctor for my needless worry. Had she been more interested in being a health care provider it would have helped, I think. Instead she seemed put out that I was taking up space in an examining room.

My general practitioner whom I had had for over 15 years retired at the first of the year. No one came in to replace him (they just did hire someone, it took 10 months), and that left his patients hanging. This was a Carilion family practice.

When we (my husband or I) called in right after he left, we were swapped around or dispatched to a nurse practitioner. I have nothing against nurse practitioners for check ups or mundane things, but when I am sick, I want a doctor. (Now we each have "settled" on one of the physicians who practice at this clinic, but it's been a chore just getting to that point.)

When my vertigo/ear issues first hit, I saw the nurse practitioner. When she couldn't help, she sent me to a specialist I had seen before. The specialist was an absolute bozo who told me that the problem was TMJ, not my ear. He gave me an exercise that involved banging my head against the couch, saying try it, but I don't think it will work. I kid you not.

This is not TMJ, by the way.

Then, over the course of two months, with vertigo dogging me so much that I could hardly function, I visited three more general practitioners and another specialist before I ended up with the specialist I now have. And the only way I ended up with someone who at least gave me something that would help, even if I am now questioning her bedside manner, was to call my old retired doctor and ask for help.

When you are sick, jumping through that many hoops to get care is dismaying and tiring. When you need help and can't find it, you despair.

I think the health care system is completely broken. I don't know how it will be fixed. It is tied in with the economy and with finances and with people's personal wealth, so whatever you do, someone will howl. It will take a leader with very strong guts to effect great change.

But the doctors themselves could do better. I don't like feeling like I don't matter. Making a patient feel inconsequential is not what I consider good health care.

I wish the insurance companies would make the doctors have you fill out an evaluation form or else they wouldn't get paid. And then they would get paid based on the evaluation. I think if the money was truly tied to performance, it would help. As it is, why should a doctor bother spending a lot of time with a patient? He gets more money if he speeds us through like we're pigs on the way to slaughter.

I don't know if doctors actually get into medicine to help people anymore. Surely some of them do, but it seems like the money is the first thing they're worried about. So I automatically assume that the money is why they're there.

I now have a GP who will do, but I am not 100 percent pleased. And my ENT will do, but again, I am not entirely pleased.

What would I like in a doctor?

1) Genuine concern and total focus on the patient.
2) Good listening skills.
3) An understanding that the patient has lived in her body and knows when something is "off", nevermind the medical books.
4) Prescriptions that cure, not cover up.
5) Efforts to seek a cure, not the quickest way to mask the problem.
6) Explanations of all procedures and diagnoses when they are tossed out. Don't just mention "Meniere's Disease" and then never explain it, as my ENT did with me on Thursday.
7) Don't suggest procedures that have no relevance to the problem.
8) Don't automatically assume "it's all in her head."
9) A willingness to go the extra two steps it might take to help someone.

I am sure there are many more things I'd like in a doctor, but those come to mind most quickly.