So my mom was having trouble a few weeks ago when she was eating foods with a lot of fats in them. Everyone she talked to was telling her it sounded like a gall bladder attack. So she went to her doctor to find out if that was what it was.
The doctor said that her symptoms indicated that it was her gall bladder and he scheduled an ultrasound to check for stones. He also told her that she should go ahead and just schedule the surgery to have it removed right away. She waited to do that until after the test.
In the meantime the doctor told her to eat a very low fat diet. I want to say she has been eating no more than 3g of fats per day, which is not easy..
When the results of the ultrasound came back they were negative. What the ultrasound checks for is the presence of gall stones and she did not have any of those. So she called her doctor back to find out what to do. He wouldn’t talk to her directly so she had to go through his assistant. The assistant asked her if she was taking the medicine the doctor prescribed. Of course the answer was no…because he never told her she was supposed to take anything.
So the doctors answer was to take the medication for a couple of weeks and then if she was still having an issue to call him back. Which is utterly stupid if you ask me. She knows she has some problem so to simply say, “Drug yourself up and see if it works” should not be a proposed solution.
So I gave my dad a call because I know he had his gall bladder removed and I wanted to see what they did for him. He also did not have gall stones so his ultrasound showed up normal. His wife knew there was a problem so she insisted that they perform another test called a hida scan. That showed that there was a huge issue (future post) with his gall bladder and prompted surgery.
Anyway back to mom. So I called mom back and told her what happened with my dad and his gall bladder. I told her she needed to call the doctor back and insist on getting a hida scan scheduled. So she did but it was going to be over a week before they could get her in. In the meantime she filled the prescription since it did help control the attacks and continued to eat a very low fat diet.
A few days ago she finally got the hida scan done. And guess what…there is an issue with her gall bladder! Surprise! Not. The results were that her gall bladder was operating at under 35% efficiency. Or something like that. Mom was very clear when she was explaining it. She now has an appointment to talk with the surgeon before her surgery is scheduled.
What’s interesting to me with all of this is the hoops she had to jump through just to get treatment:
- Schedule an appointment with your doctor.
- Have an issue with communication over a prescription.
- Talk to an assistant who acts as a go-between with the doctor so that you can get the correct information that you paid for in your appointment. Or you can pay the doctor again to get an appointment to get the correct information from him.
- Get the correct info from the assistant after a day or two of going back and forth.
- Get told to suffer through and take medicine for weeks before taking any action.
- Do the research on your own, find the correct info, haggle with doctors assistant so you are allowed to schedule the proper tests.
- Find out that the test you insisted on, that the doctor wanted you to wait weeks to schedule, identified the problem.
- Schedule a consultation with the surgeon for a week later.
- schedule the surgery a week after that.
Here is what I think the problem is. The patient is NOT the customer. The insurance company is. The patient is simply the medium by which the doctor and insurance company conduct their business.
Think of it like this. The doctor is a mechanic, the insurance company is the owner of a car and the patient is the car. So when the car (the patient) is making a noise (gall bladder pain) and is brought in to the mechanic (the doctor), the customer (the insurance company) wants to try and pay as little as possible. So when the mechanic (doctor) tells the customer (insurance company) that the problem is that the car (patient) is low on oil and needs an oil change (gall bladder surgery) the customer (insurance company) tries to get away with not paying for a full oil change and just ads a little oil (medicine) to stop the car (patient) from making the noise. Meanwhile, the mechanic (doctor) knows that the customer (insurance company) is a cheap bastard but still wants to earn as much as possible, so he has the customer (insurance company) continue to bring the car (patient) in for an appointment for every little squeak (question) that the car (patient) makes!
