Moral Meeny
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Diagnosis, Doctor?
Okay, I admit I'm a computer geek not a biology or medical geek. But I worry sometimes, I really do. Where *did* that specialist get their qualifications? How come they call their office a 'practice', and why can't I get a refund if they get it wrong? Yeap these are jokes, and old jokes at that, but I've found that every joke has at it's core some grating element of fact and truth that someone just had to vent.
Here's an intersting thing. For most of my young life I lived in the Northwest of Western Australia, where flouride and chlorine were not routinely added to the water supply, and I thrived and felt good. Then I moved to the lovely capital of WA, Perth, and suddenly my skin developed red blotches, dry patches, it itched and burnt and hurt like hell and so I went to see my GP about it before I flayed myself alive with scratching.
GP was very good about it. 'Mumble snabbledegook allergic mumble snedgerish soap' he burbled at me, then flourished his pen and wrote me a prescription for coaltar products, liquid soap, and soothing moisturising lotion. I spent hard-earned cash on the products, took the whole shebang home and used it for months and months and months. In the process I acquired several shebang-loads of the stuff and used it religiously, waiting for the skin to clear up.
Six months and a few hundred dollars later, I threw the last crappy odoriferous crap in the bin and went back to normal soap and shampoo. My skin cleared up. I breathed a sigh of relief, and felt great for a year or two when...
Went back to the NW again. Came back to Perth a year later, skin began the same fandango again, and this time I was on the other side of Perth and seeing a different GP. He referred me to what I will, laughingly, refer to as a dermatologist and skin specialist. In fact this doctor is one of Perth's leading dermos, and he took just one look to confirm his suspicions. 'Mumble snabbledegook soap mumble snedgerish psoriasis' was his comment, and I officially had psoriasis, one of the most depressing disease in history. Only leprosy could have been worse.
He told me that the shebangs of stuff I'd used were of little use, made a little flourish over the precription pad as he prescribed steroid creams, sun, sand, and sea, and sent me on my way. Since I also lived right across on the opposite side of the city from the beaches, I had to modify that a little bit and set up a solarium area in the back yard where I could sunbathe without nosy neighbours snooping on me, and the shebang of creams I was on cost as much over the next six months as those special soaps and shampoos and creams had. And that was that. After almost a year, it settled down by itself.
Score so far - doctors nil, Nature two.
A few years later the whole thing recurred. The GP where I lived prescribed one tube of cream after another, some of them (as I discovered later) even dangerous if misused. Score: Doctors nil, Nature about fifteen.
Finally after a really bad bout, the GP sent me, as luck would have it, to the same dermatologist. 'Mumble snabbledegook old mumble snedgerish dry skin' he said.
'But hang on doctor, isn't psoriasis, sort of, for life? How come now I don't have psoriasis, and have old dry skin instead? Which diagnosis is right?'
'Mumble snabbledegook old mumble snedgerish dry skin' he said.
He did the by now familiar flourish over the prescription pad, and out came a whole shebang of the same coaltar and skin lotion products he'd told me were crap four years ago. Wow pharmacology must have made some advances in the last five years. Pity doctors hadn't... I threw his prescription in the bin at his reception on the way out, to a startled yelp from the receptionist, and won't go there again. Besides, it's settled down by itself again...
But where did he get a degree? A clue as to this man's mind could be seen on the bookshelf placed on the patient's side of his desk, containing (I am NOT kidding here!) the Dermatology Journals in hardcover, from about 1950something up to 1970something. Can you spell ostentatious wanker, children?
Are all specialists that useless? Obviously not, or they'd be out of business - no patients left alive you see - so there must be something to this specialising lurk. Just that I'm blowed if I've seen any benefits... My gastro specialist: 'No the acid you're experiencing can't be happening because you're taking medication X, and therefore you CAN'T have acid.' This after I've just told him that I know what hydrochloric acid tastes like from chemistry days, and telling him that this was acid.
WTF is he on? When one of my customers tells me that his PC won't boot, I don't tell him 'you have software X, therefore you computer can't actually fail to boot' - if I did, I'd be looking for work in about an hour after that. Come to think of it if I'd tried to fix a non-booting machine by replacing the mouse, and then unrepentantly saying 'Mumble snabbledegook bios mumble snedgerish motherboard' I wouldn't have a job either...
And what else did the good gastro doc say? 'Mumble snabbledegook hiatus mumble snedgerish look inside' he said, then came that flourish, and he booked me in for a dual (endoscopy and colonoscopy) at $800 for 30 minutes of one of his mates' time.
I threw it in the bin at his reception...
My GP laughed about him when I brought the story to him,,
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
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