How wrong can it be to want to just see a ball game
and maybe go on a little fishing trip?
Posted on 07/08/2007 8:36:19 PM PDT by neverdem
ONE kind of new year comes for all of us in January — the one we celebrate with Champagne. But another, more stressful new year begins for doctors in July, when the new interns arrive in our emergency rooms, clinics and wards. Hospital personnel have always joked, “Don’t get sick in July,” since for decades the trainees were loosely supervised.
Today, most hospitals closely watch over interns. But at the start of this new medical year, a significant deficiency remains in the system: the way in which doctors are trained to think.
One of my first experiences with the problem came in 1983, during the first week in July as it happens, when my wife, Pam, also a doctor, and I were traveling to Boston from California with our son Steven, then 9 months old. Steve had developed a low-grade fever, had dark and loose stools and was irritable, refusing to nurse. Stopping in Connecticut to visit my in-laws, we consulted the town pediatrician. The doctor quickly dismissed Pam’s concerns. “You’re overanxious,” he told her. “Doctor-parents are like this.”
By the time we arrived in Boston, the baby was ashen and he was jerking his knees to his chest and wailing in pain. We rushed to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital, where a new surgical resident examined him, ordered X-rays and blood tests and made the correct diagnosis: an intussusception, an intestinal obstruction. It was a hectic night, and the novice doctor was being pulled in many directions. He told us there was no urgency to operate and left us alone with our flailing child.
I had worked one year in a research lab at this hospital and phoned the senior hematologist who had been my mentor. He contacted an attending surgeon, who came to the emergency room and...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I have been quite unimpressed by most of the doctors I've encountered.
Excellent advice in any area of human endeavor.
I just wish things were like when my grandfather was a doctor, I used to accompany him on house calls. He was an old school doctor and todays doctors should strive to what he did. I remember him taking vegatables for payment you would never see that today.
I have a rare spinal malformation, Arnold-Chiari Type 1 with syringomyelia.
I endured over a year of doctors poking, prodding, trying stuff that didn’t work and acting like it was all in my head.
It got to the point where at 21 years old, all I could do was get up each morning, go to work, work 8 hours, go home, and go back to bed. It was miserable.
Well, it was all in my head. The back of my head. And once I was referred to the right neurosurgeon, Dr. Swanson in Ann Arbor, MI., he opened up the back of my head and fixed it. 10 years later, I live a very normal life with a husband and 3 (soon to be 4) beautiful kids. I thank God for doctors like him.
It took a while to get there, but Doctors are human, too, and much of the time, they genuinely want to help people.
Did it take that long to get a MRI to make the diagnosis?
I lost my unborn daughter last year, to severe early preeclampsia. There were five doctors before who might have connected a piece of family history to the uncontrollable hypertension, and didn’t, and three doctors afterward, who didn’t. It took a specialist’s specialist in NYC to finally say, hmm, I wonder...
And the heartbreaking thing is, it might have been treatable if someone had put the puzzle together...and the condition that my mother and I share, while rare, is not as obscure as all that...
What's that condition, if I may ask? A number of docs are on this forum, including me and those on my ping list.
Inhaling From Just One Cigarette Can Lead To Nicotine Addiction: Kids Show Signs Of Addiction...
Giant Microwave Turns Plastic Back To Oil
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Fibromuscular dysplasia. My mother survived a cerebral aneurysm; I have renal artery stenosis, which is the more common involvement. I had hypertension before the pregnancy and it was always assumed to be primary even though I’d told my doctors about my mother’s FMD. I thought I didn’t have it because of a negative U/S on my cerebral arteries years ago.
My obstetricians knew about the FMD but didn’t connect the dots; I never had time to discuss it with the perinatologist or the nephrologist, and a renal ultrasound showed nothing. About a 40% false negative on that. And I didn’t tell the perinatologist or nephrologist because I thought the renal U/S was reliable and my kidneys were OK, and I didn’t want them to rush induction even more because of the increased stroke risk. Responsibility enough to go around.
Even the super-specialist in NYC didn’t get it right away, but she took time enough to talk everything through, afresh. I read Groopman’s book last week; so many doctors don’t do that. There is too much to keep track of; so many conditions and so many patients.
Actually I never even got to talk with the nephrologist before delivery - he just interpreted the U/S.
Thanks for sharing!
Nurses do this too. I’ve seen it many times.
Some of the best doctors I’ve known are those who instead of labeling a patient a complainer or worse, are able to say (paraphrased) “I don’t know what is wrong but I am willing to listen and help figure this out” whether they refer out or continue treatment themselves. A lot of doctors get hostile and blame the patient when they can’t make a diagnosis.
Thanks for the ping. Thanks to all for the positive, negative, humorous life stories.
Yes, because the neurologist did an electro-myelogram (which is a HORRIBLE test) and it told them that I had a slipped disc. So they treated me for 6 weeks as though I had a slipped disc. I was told I should be all good, and then after about 6 more weeks of pain, went through another 6 weeks of physical therapy.
When the physical therapy didn’t work and started to become more and more painful, they finally decided to try something else.
That’s when I finally got my first MRI.
Thinking is the problem.
Practicing doc has a few minutes to come up with tests, diagnosis, treatment. Zebras get regularly turned into horses...but, also, horses of one breed get turned into other breeds.
In addition, every computerized record system I’ve seen leaves out space for puzzlement and warning equivocation: “looks like just A but patient history means watch out a bit on this, could be B.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.