FIGHTING THE HEALTH SYSTEM
It would not quite be accurate to say that I’m angry about the state of our health care in this country, but exasperated is not quite strong enough. My life has not been in danger, but my comfort and freedom from worry have been assaulted. Finally, I just took everything into my own hands, using the Internet to achieve something like a medical education.
Not that I’m entirely Dr. Quack. I was careful to use trustworthy sources like major university sources, respected journals, Mayo and so on. I quickly shut off men in white coats who claim to be doctors and female “health coaches” with chirpy voices. I was a hospital chaplain for a summer in a large regional hospital where I read all patient files and attended the daily seminar on difficult cases. I was a ward clerk at my local hospital for six months.
The issue is Diabetes II which has been suspected all my life and was diagnosed years ago. The complication is the state of the doctors, their domination by pharma corporations, equal domination by insurance providers, and oppression by hospitals of all sizes. Our local Montana county hospitals have now be gulped down by a mega-monster called Logan. The little hospitals simply didn’t have the resources to operate a state-of-the-art facility. Previously, the nun-run hospitals in Great Falls, where just before WWII my aunt proudly served as a nurse, have been sold to secular bodies, a corporation who merged them though they were still on separate campuses so that patients had to be shuttled between them by ambulance.
Another trend has been young women who purport to be Physician Assistants, Super Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, and other euphemisms to deal with the hordes of people who cannot understand simple directions by not eating sugar if you have diabetes, which means that one must take insulin that costs thousands of dollars and is as corrosive to one’s system as the glucose.
Access to prescriptions has been weaponized so that these often young women use their ability to control meds to demand respect from sceptical patients. But their diagnostic skills are limited by their small experience of the world. One, a nurse, had a Ph.D discussing Indian “chiefs” who required dialysis because of diabetes, but let us think she was an MD.
Specifically, no doc or substitute realized how long I’d been taking Metformin — the standard prescription for Diabetes II — though the med plainly warns that after use for several years side effects will occur. Like constant diarrhea, headaches, muscle aches, etc. The female doc I just left, the one who admires celebrity docs, brushed all that aside and told me to drink green tea. The idea was that I was old, undependable, and whiny. This was obvious because I wore old clothes, had bad hair, and a pot belly.
Finally I found a doc who was near retirement (which means I’m old enough to be his mother) and relaxed when he took a long family history and asked a lot of questions. He sent me to xray to confirm I didn’t have some kind of tumor fouling up my guts. But he didn’t change my prescription. And next I had to be helped by his Physician Assistant who was a bully.
So I came home and googled every single symptom, prescription, most recent research, and testimony. After I typed out an eleven-page condensation of my research, I went back to give it to that male doc who would at least listen, and talked him into replacing both metformin and my high blood pressure med (cough,cough) with specific confirmed alternatives. The diarrhea stopped. My cough stopped. (I had 2 vaccinations for Covid but still worried.) The aching stopped. My head cleared.
Doctors are peer-driven and peers have the ability to detect and punish bad practice, though the state also gets into it and I watched them displace but not shut down a DO (variation on MD). He started a new clinic in the next town over. Montana has one of the least restrictive bodies of medical law and attracts docs with a record of malpractice suits because the state doesn’t publish the record as other states do. There is a professional practice ethics self-monitoring group which doesn’t like to rock the boat.
This is a red state. People tend to trust authorities, but once burnt they treat all authorities with self-preserving scepticism, just like me. A small proportion have and use computers, but everyone swaps anecdotes, esp. the gruesome ones. The citizens here tend to be old because the economics that drew them, sustained them, and then deserted them was largely based on resource development, which means that when the ore and pumping ended, the money left. But the people do what they have always done, because that’s safer with all the carpetbaggers now running our politics.
I’m blue but I’m 82. If that rhymes, I can’t help it. I’m only marginally in control these days, pushed around by kittens and guys who come to fix things. I get angry. And disappointed. But I feel much better.
