Know all to well about doctors who are inept or do unnecessary surgeries to defraud Medicare. I was the victim, I now have reduced hearing in 1 ear and constant pain in the other. Told it was the only way to cure Vertigo/Menieres..at my age you don’t get sudden onset of them like I did, there are under lying causes, mini strokes or pinched neck nerves...that was my case.
Have an internist who does NOT read medical histories either, so I get drugs I can’t take. Doctors do not keep up with side effects it seems. I send them back to the pharmacist as refused.
Also had to pay for a tummy tuck when the GYN who did my Hist messed my stomach up and I kept getting chronic fungal infections under the uneven painful 2.5 inch bulge he left..I am not over weight...119. The anti-fungal meds stopped working this year., 3 trips to the ER for them was enough. General surgeons do not do ab reconstructions, even for medical conditions around here. And Plastic’s only do them as vanities...it cured 3 health conditions I’ve had since 1998. So in that I am well pleased, will be a month on the 16th. Have a great doc in her.
Frankly, doctors scare me to death. I have a littany of horror stories that I could tell you, but the worst was a time that I got a call from an emergency room doctor at JFK hospital in Cherry Hill, NJ. The doctor told me that my mother had just been brought into the hospital and had suffered a brain stem stroke from which she would not recover and wanted to remove the breathing tube and put her on an IV morphine drip.
I said no, not until I got to the hospital (I live in WA state) and saw her condition for myself. The doctor argued that it was unnecessary, that they only had limited medicare dollars and that those dollars should be saved for younger, more vital people. I said that I didn’t care.
So, that was Sunday and I didn’t get to the hospital until the next day. When I got there we found my mother in ICU with a breathing tube and her arms and legs restrained, tied to an IV drip and bruises up and down her arms. She wasn’t unconscious, but her eyes were closed. When I told her that I was there, she wiggled, almost convulsed in response, but couldn’t move. I called the nurse and she told her open her eyes and she responded, I asked the nurse what was going on, why is she so bruised? The nurse responded that she had been fighting them, trying to pull out the IV and the breathing tube.
I said, so this brain dead woman is fighting you? She doesn’t want to be intubated, but she’s brain dead and can’t think for herself, so you just forced the tube down her throat? She just looked at me. I said get the doctor down here now.
She didn’t, but the next day my mother was out of ICU and on her way back to the nursing home. She hadn’t had a stroke, she had fallen on the stairs and hit her head.
Then there was the doctor that diagnosed my husband’s bone tumor as tendonitis. The tumor was allowed to grow for another nine months, to the point of almost causing a stress fracture, before they finally did an x-ray. The problem is that my husband looks so healthy and no doctor ever suspects that there is anything seriously wrong with him.