More on Health

I try to catch up, but it just isn't working. Ended up working until late at night for WORK so I'm just now starting my blog. Which means I doubt I'll get it all up before the night's out. Whew!

I mentioned some speculation about unforeseen consequences for our pill-poppin' tendencies in my last blog. But I kind of would like to continue that line of thinking with regards to the whole health care industry. Now, let me preface my opinions with an assurance that I know many health care professionals are dedicated and devoted. I don't intend to imply that problems I've seen are a condemnation of the whole medical profession.

However, there are some serious problems out there, whether they result from insurance issues or financial pressures or laziness - a tendency that exists in most professionals to find an "obvious" answer and then leave there without looking deeper. In certain professions, like space safety, that kind of laziness can get people killed (or at least spacecraft lost). This is also true for the medical profession.

Too often, in my opinion, an obvious answer is addressed without digging for the real cause. Treat a symptom without realizing what the real problem is.

Case in point, my mother-in-law, for instance, has been battling mini-heart attacks since she was thirty-seven (little less than a decade, by the way - yes, my husband's younger). She's gone into the emergency room multiple times. She's fought multiple bladder and other abdominal infections and pains that no one's taken seriously. So, two weeks ago, she went into the emergency room and someone suspected a gall bladder problem and gave her a simple blood test. There it was. Her gall bladder was 19 cm in diameter (instead of the normal 3) and filled to (literally!) bursting with 37 gall stones. And, yeah, the doctor thinks it's been a problem for ten years but no one ever checked.

Now, this is one person, anecdotal evidence at it's best, but can you honestly say you don't know a story like this? Someone calling in to the doctor with their four month baby's coughing but never able to get an appointment, but getting prescription medicine over the phone, only to force the issue and find out the baby now has pneumonia because she'd been given the wrong medicine? When she told me I'd made my baby sick because I'd given her the wrong medicine (that she'd prescribed), I vowed never to go back to that doctor. And I didn't.

A relative's son had surgery for an in-grown toenail. He ended up with a fever that the doctor repeated dismissed over the phone. Fortunately for mymy relative's son, my relative took her son to the emergency room when his temperature topped 103. But not, unfortunately, before he ended up with an infection in his bones that made for three very scary days in the hospital and took six months of IV antibiotics to overcome.

My poor mother-in-law has had a number of doctors that have not ever seemed to delve to her real problems. But I learned something listening to her struggles. I believe most doctors do their best, but, even under the best circumstances, they aren't going to understand your body as well as you do. They're going to know how many people react to certain medicines, but they don't know how you have responded or will respond. When it comes to your health and the health of your family, you had better be an informed consumer and know what's happening and what isn't going like it should.

People don't come with warranties and you can't just toss 'em if they break down. And, for all the uncertainties and unknowns that come with chemistry and physics, it's just a drop in the bucket to what we don't know about biology.

Just sayin'.