To the Editor:
My buddy, Al, was sure on a roll the other night when we played our weekly poker game. Al’s about to fire his primary physician. He says that the guy is just too busy to listen, too quick to prescribe meds, and too quick to go to the next examining room.
His doctor felt that Al’s blood pressure had gone up a lot since his last visit. Al made a feeble attempt to tell him that for the last month his trusted accountant had made some major errors on his last two years of filing his tax returns. Pure and simple, not Al’s doing at all, but the so-called professional had forgotten to include major withdrawals from Al’s pension funds. Penalties and fines were sure to come in the mail, if not a full, dreaded audit. His accountant still maintains that Al had not provided needed information about withdrawals, pure butt-savings on the part of his tax prep man. A suit was in the making.
Al felt that his words fell on deaf ears. Al’s no shrink, but his common sense belief that what he tried to explain to his doctor would have even elevated the blood pressure of Padre Pio. Al feels that his doctor is just too busy to listen. He’s got seven examining rooms going for him each hour, which means that if Al got a 10-minute session, he was lucky indeed. Al argues that it’s all about the money and that his doctor should have pursued business not medicine where his profit motive could more easily have been achieved.
Al’s no baby. He understands that insurance companies and lawyers waiting in the shallows like sharks have made their impact on the practice of medicine. He argues and so did the other guys sitting around the poker table that listening to what’s going on in the life of a patient still holds some significant bearing on making a diagnosis and prescribing medications.
We might have trouble finding a doctor who takes time to listen in this day and age. Listening intently to patients as an approach to the practice of family medicine might have gone out about the same time that house calls vanished.
Cape May – Governor Murphy says he doesn't know anything about the drones and doesn't know what they are doing but he does know that they are not dangerous. Does anyone feel better now?
