DOCTORS: WELL-TRAINED BODY MECHANICS

There exist among doctors the 'Click and Clacks' who are good diagnosticians, surgeons, and educators. There are also those who are not, but still answer to the title 'Doctor'. There have been some difficult moments for me in doctors' offices when I feel they didn't hear a word I said. Most frightening for me was hearing "Oops" while I heard what sounded like a saw (it was in fact a power drill inserting screws in my broken ankle. I had a spinal and was fully conscious and no one would tell me why someone said the 'oops'.

Another time an oral surgeon was annoyed because I made him use a hospital and surgery so my insurance would pay for it rather than pay out of pocket so he could perform the surgery in his office. At the time, I had no money to spare for 'principle' to show the insurance company the error of its way! As a result, though I had asked him to talk to me during the surgery, he spoke nothing to me and kept chatting with the nurse. He later told me he did it deliberately because I had refused to have the surgery in his office. I never went back to him and have no respect for his lack of respect for my financial situation. His fee may have seemed insignificant for him but it would have been massive to me, out of pocket at the time.

Most frustrating are the doctors who say, "There is nothing wrong with you. I find nothing." That their ability to see the first sentence as 'ergo' the conclusion is that there is nothing wrong is unconscionable. It should read, "I can find nothing wrong with you. You must either see someone else or undergo tests to check what I have not been able to find." That hubris does not belong in medicine and equates with the mechanic who says I fixed your brakes when in fact, he did nothing significant to them.

Harvard University
Former journal editor decries research 'corruption'
Link|Comments (2) Posted by Elizabeth Cooney December 26, 2008 12:10 PM

"Dr. Marcia Angell takes on conflicts of interest, blockbuster drug development, and disease-mongering in The New York Review of Books.

In her review of books by Alison Bass ("Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial"), Melody Petersen ("Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs"), and Christopher Lane ("Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness"), she also evaluates the current practice of medicine and the conduct of research.

"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines," she writes. "I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."

Drugs companies aren't the only ones at fault, she says.

"As reprehensible as many industry practices are, I believe the behavior of much of the medical profession is even more culpable," she writes. "If the medical profession does not put an end to this corruption voluntarily, it will lose the confidence of the public, and the government (not just Senator Grassley) will step in and impose regulation. No one in medicine wants that."

The error in Dr. Angell's writing is that she write the public WILL lose confidence in the medical profession. I believe she is too late. I lost it quite a few years ago. I believe that each patient should be their own advocate and ask as many questions as they have to ask to assure that the doctor knows what they are talking about instead of assuming that the doctor does. Too many practices allow each doctor 10 or 15 minutes with each patient. This is an absolutely absurd restriction p[ut on the physicians. Now all problems can be solved in the same amount of time, even the 'easy' ones. Two things should happen. Patients should be more aware of how they are describing their symptoms so that the doctor gets an accurate picture, and that patients do their own research on line until this happens.