Let's Go Visit The Doctor

Let’s Go Visit the Doctor

  I hate going to the doctor. I hate hospitals even worse, but that’s another story. I’m getting old, or am old depending on your point of view. So visits to the doctor are becoming more and more frequent as time goes on. But most of my visits to the doctor aren’t for me. I have had to take my mother to the doctor often and my father even more so on a regular basis. Both my parents are in their mid-eighties. And judging from their quality of life, it’s not a place I really want to be. Anyway, I’m old enough to remember times when the family doctor would still make “house calls”. When I had my tonsils out, I had a hemorrhaging problem and the Doc came to the house to check me out. I ended up in the hospital the very next morning. I remember that the doctor was the same one who delivered most of us, and he genuinely seemed to care about our health. Granted, medical science was still a long way from what it is today, and what he could do was limited. But he did his best to fix or cure what ailed us.

  Nowadays, we all know the routine when it comes to doctor visits. They don’t come see you. You have to go see them. My doctor charges $75 for me to just walk into one of his little rooms whether he actually does anything for me or not. Then when you get there at your appointed time, you discover that fifty other people have the same appointment time as you. So you all get to wait in a crowded waiting area with quite a few folks that are obviously sick and spreading germs all over the place. While you’re waiting, you notice a parade of handsomely dressed women in high heels coming in to the waiting room and being let in to the office area by the receptionist. They all are dragging one of those little suitcases on wheels behind them. Yep, drug company reps with the latest samples they want your doctor to push on to you. And did you know that your doctor gets “perks” like free vacations to Hawaii and such if he writes X number of prescriptions for the latest wonder drug for the newly made up “disease”? So now your appointment was for 9:00 o’clock a.m. and you’ve been sitting there for over an hour and a half past that when your name is finally called. You feel like you just won the lottery and jump up eager to put down a year old issue of People magazine, that you weren’t really reading anyway, and get this over with.

  But it ain’t over yet. You get to go sit in a little isolation chamber while a nurse weighs, pokes, and prods you like you were some prized Herford that was coming up for auction, and then proceeds to ask you a bunch of questions that you just had to answer on a form while you were sitting out in the waiting area. You’re sitting there wondering why couldn’t you have just brought the form in here and handed it to her. After all, she seems to be the one who really needed to know all this stuff in the first place. But you don’t say anything because you don’t want to risk slowing the process down any further. The nurse leaves out of the room and you’re left alone. No old magazines in here, so you stare at the skeletal chart on the wall and wonder if your insides really look anything like that. As you sit there listening to torture sounds coming from some of the adjoining rooms, you start to think that when the President said it was okay for waterboarding that maybe your doctor decided to get into the act right along with the CIA. After all he’s been in the torture business a lot longer than they have. You start to wonder if maybe you’re next and begin to strain your ears to figure out just what really is going on over there. You would think that they would pipe in some elevator music or something in here to calm your nerves and mask those screams and pitiful crying of poor little children who are obviously being abused not twenty feet away from where you’re sitting. By the time your doctor finally does pop into the room, you’re bored, need to pee really bad, and more than just a little spooked.

  Your doctor has to look at your chart to see what your name is because he doesn’t remember you from the last time you were here, and he needs to get an idea of why you’re here taking up his valuable time. He then proceeds to ask you some of the same questions that the nurse asked you earlier and that you had to answer on that stupid form. Once the interrogation is over, he gets around to asking why you’re here today. You cautiously explain to him what’s going on with you, and he half-heartedly listens nodding his head at seemingly appropriate times while scribbling something down on your chart that only a team of highly trained cryptographers could interpret. You can usually tell that his mind is really a million miles away or perhaps thinking about that Hawaii vacation while you chatter on about how much it hurts and wonder what could possibly have caused this in the first place. The doctor, as you may not realize, doesn’t really care about the cause and, heaven forbid, a cure. It may even be that a previous medication he had prescribed for you is the cause of your current ailment. He is just doing what the NSA does when they monitor your phone calls. He listens for key words and, when he hears them, he nods his head and writes you a prescription again using that encryption that no ordinary human being could read. This prescription is for the latest wonder drug that is not going to cure anything but just may mask the symptoms you’re having temporarily until your body becomes immune to it. Meanwhile it too will come with certain side effects that will guarantee you a return visit to the doctor’s office where you get to repeat the whole torture process all over again. After writing the prescription, he’s gone in a flash on to the next victim…I mean patient…and you are completely forgotten until the next time you can spare $75 for a visit and waste half your day sitting around in a germ filled waiting room, and then get to pay even more for some new wonder drug that at least might earn someone a trip to Hawaii.

  If you’re like my parents and my wife that passed away, after you’ve repeated this process several times you find yourself taking two handfuls of meds every day and still wonder why your digestive system is all messed up and you don’t feel any better than you did before all this craziness started. Such is the state of modern medicine. Doctors have become drug pushers for big pharmaceutical companies and you have become guinea pigs in their gigantic chemistry experiment that is making them richer than King Midas. A side benefit to all this is that five years after these new wonder drugs come out, cheesy lawyers get to start a feeding frenzy over suing big pharmaceutical companies for the consequences their drugs have caused. The big drug companies aren’t bothered by this. They’ve gotten so rich off of their poison already that the fines are just chump change to them. They pay it and move on to the next drug they can push on to doctors and you. It’s a vicious cycle that has nothing to do with your health or wellbeing. Knowing this, needless to say, I avoid going to the doctor as much as possible. And I have flat told him I’m not taking certain drugs no matter what. Fear of dying is not one of my ailments. Fear of getting old and unable to enjoy life is. So, I for one, think it is way better to just eat as healthy as you can and live life to the fullest while you can and let nature take its course.