I think I ticked off my cardiologist yesterday. I had a presumed stroke in January and have been seeing this guy. He wants me to go in to have a T.E.E. done (Transesophageal Echo Cardiography) to look at my aortic valve. It's no big deal, just a check-the-box thing. It's done in a hospital setting. COIVD has caused the test to be cancelled and not rescheduled. So the guy has me going back in every 3 months for no apparent benefit. The assistant takes my blood pressure, hooks me up to an EKG machine, then the doctor comes in and tells me that we won't be doing the procedure soon because of COVID. Then we're done. The insurance gets billed for several hundred dollars, and all the heavy lifting is done by an assistant who could not even tell me which number is systolic and which is diastolic when I asked at my last visit (my systolic number had gone up.) My blood pressure has been very low for my entire life and I have never had any heart problems, so there is no need for me to have these monitored on a routine basis. I think I'm a handy "Get in/Get out/Send a bill" vehicle for him. So yesterday he talks about me coming back in 3 months and I said "I could do that, but where's the real need? I don't really have a reason for these things to be monitored, and if the hospital is not gonna be available to us for a while, then what's the value?" He sarcastically replied "Well, we certainly wouldn't want to waste your time." I told him it's not a waste of time if there's a real benefit for the return visits. So he said "How about 6 months? See you in February." I'm not sure we parted as friends. Man, either I'm turning into a cantankerous ba$tard or I'm having some bad luck with the medical profession where I now live...or maybe both.
I'd vote for both @John Brunner Last time I saw cardiologist he said 6 months I said 1 year and that's what it is.
@John Brunner what was his diagnosis of your problem? Enlarged heart, congestive heart failure? He must have some idea what he is looking for and not just a fishing trip.
Strokes are what they call "diagnosis by exclusion." They look for everything else that might have caused the symptoms, and when there is no evidence of those other things, the answer is "stroke." There were tests for things that are known risk factors for stroke (clogged arteries, high blood pressure, echo cardiogram, atrial fibrillation, smoking) but I have none of those. They did an echo cardiogram in the hospital and this guy did one in his office and also checked for a hole in my heart. I wore a heart monitor for a month checking for A-Fib. Excepting the potential of A-Fib to create blood clots that might lead to a stroke, this is not really a heart thing. If I had plaque in my arteries it would be a circulatory system thing, but I don't. Everything is fine except for some "vegetative growth" on my aortic valve (a very common thing) that may have flaked off and gone to the brain. That is what the hospital procedure is for...to take a look at it. But it's really just a check the box thing. At this point he's not looking for anything. There's nothing to find. There are no more tests being done. My past 2 visit have been as I described: I go in, they do an EKG, take my blood pressure, and tell me that the check of my aortic valve has been pushed off ito the future. There is no need for me to go back.
I've posted enough about my bad experiences with doctors the last two to three years and I'm not going to repeat. Suffice to say, these days the less I see of them the better I feel.
I have two doctors who come to visit and we are friends they know how I feel about their medical system but that dose not stop us from being friends. When I have a medical problem I will ask them for their opinion or what they suggest. If it does not make sense to me I will do something different. One even buys colloidal silver from me.
I have also had interactions with other doctors like the one who visited me and saying he has to go back to Italy for knee replacement I told him what to do and a year later he visited me gave me a big hug and said when he seen his doctor for is knee he had no problems it was just fine. The other specialist doctor told my mother in law she had CHF, enlarged heart, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol three month later had a clean bill of health and when asked by the doctor what did you do she said I followed what my son in law told me. He said he wanted to see me that was three years ago and I am still waiting.
@Dwight Ward How absolutely your feelings parallel my own. My seriously flawed experiences with doctors began at 19 when an oral surgeon tried to convince us the abscess in my upper tooth was a "tumor". He had scheduled a Cauldwell-Luc radical maxillary operation, but my Dad set him straight. Our old family dentist, unavailable on Good Friday, extracted the tooth (not 4 as the surgeon scheduled), it healed appropriately, and six months later during routine checkup I told him the entire "tumor" story. He was shocked, showed me pictures of the operation in a textbook. He called the procedure a "last ditch" one if other approaches failed to eliminate a cyst. Following that experience, I was wary of doctors in general. Frank
Just got an email from my PCP. He'd like to see me. 2 prior appointments cancelled because of #scamdemic
That's pretty funny. Makes one wonder if pharmacists take a special "Decipher the Scrawl" class. I don't know how they read it.
I haven't gotten a handwritten prescription in years. Most of the time they are sent electronically, or if they actually give me a piece of paper it has been printed out and the doctor's signature stamped on.
Before my doctor retired I always received a handwritten script. Electronically only happened when I needed a refill before my next appointment which only happened twice a year and scripts were for three months.