When I try to call my doctor, usually I get a busy signal or an answering machine saying the office is closed. I get the answering machine even during business hours. The answering machine does not invite me to leave a message. It just says call back when we are open. If I'm asking for a prescription refill, after I get through to a person, that person will transfer me to an answering machine where I listen to a message saying it may take them up to 48 hours to reply to any messages, and then they let me leave my information on the answering machine. If I ask them to call in my prescription to a pharmacy, they require me to give them the pharmacy phone number, so I look it up in the phone book. The pharmacy is two blocks from them. I would think that they might keep phone numbers of local pharmacies handy in their office.
When I go to my doctor for an annual checkup, she does spend time with me, but if I go in for a sick visit, she tends to seem rushed. I also get the impression that doctors think their function is to write prescriptions, and if my problem can't be cured with prescription drugs, then they aren't all that interested in it.
When I went to my doctor saying I was still feeling the effects of an illness I got some time ago, she sent me for a test to see if I still had the illness. It turns out, that test only works in the early stage of the illness. She didn't know that. Doctors are supposed to know stuff like that.
I think I have a relatively good doctor. Others I have been to were worse. My doctor usually sees me not too long after the scheduled time of my appointment. At another doctor's office, I usually had to wait a long time after the scheduled time of my appointment. I had another doctor notice a rash which I was not concerned about. I told her what it was, since it was a problem I had had before. She told me it was something different, and told me what to put on it. The thing she told me to put on it ended up making it worse. My brother was also made worse by a medicine a doctor recommended. Another doctor I saw pushed free samples of medications on me, even after I told him repeatedly that I did not want them and never had the symptoms that the medication was meant to alleviate. Some comments that were made about a doctor some of my family members went to: "He's not bad, especially if it's the nurse practitioner who sees you," and "He's okay as long as you're not sick."
I think my doctor is pretty conscientious. I think the problem is with the health care system. The impression I get is that the doctors I have been to are all dealing with too many patients, so they can't really give good attention to the patients or to their own learning. I think it's admirable that they continue as primary care physicians in the poor conditions created by our health care system, rather than become specialists who only help rich people.
I was reading about careers as a CNA. (That stands for certified nursing assistant.) It sounded terrible. Nursing homes and hospitals are so understaffed. Patients who can't go to the bathroom by themselves have to wait a long time to be taken to the bathroom by a CNA because the CNA has so many patients who all need care at the same time. Imagine the discomfort of not being able to go to the bathroom when you need to.
CNAs have a very tough job. They get little pay and little respect. If someone is working as a CNA, it's most likely that they put up with having such a terrible job because they actually care about helping people. Yet we drive these caring people out of the field because of the poor working conditions.
People talk about the placebo effect as if it's just about stupidity or something, that it's just wrong for patients to get better when given a pill that has not actual pharmacological effects. I think that many people miss the important lesson of the placebo effect. What the placebo effect tells us is that just having someone pay attention to you and care for you has a healing effect. The way our health care system is set up, so that health care professionals have to deal with many more patients than they have time for, is detrimental to healing. If doctors, nurses, CNAs, and others could really take the time to attend to the needs of patients, I think patients would be healthier and perhaps the needs for medications and surgeries would even decrease.
I went to a naturopathic doctor the other day. She explained that they study the things MD's study, but they also study things like homeopathy, clinical nutrition, etc. That seemed to make so much more sense to me. Doctors should not be limited to prescription drugs as the only tool for healing, when other remedies also exist. Doctors should be people who heal, by whatever means works, not people whose job is to write prescriptions.
It's easy to see that our health care system leaves a lot to be desired. I can find that out just by dialing my doctor's phone number and not being able to get through. The hard part is figuring out how to fix it. I don't like to hear people complaining about what morons the politicians are for not fixing health care. It's a difficult, complex problem which is not easily solved.
I think one of the difficulties has to do with the fact that we live in a capitalist system, and yet we believe that there are certain things, such as education and health care, which should be open to all. Wealthy people can get better health care. The problem is how to make health care available to all while at the same time funding it in such a way that high quality can be maintained.
