Doctors and Plumbers...Part V....by Jamil Shawwa

The doctor with a title of assistant professor kept calling, he wants to do more exams and said that he wanted to make sure, because he was surprised from the results of the previous exams. He said that he cared and maybe he did, but again he was the same doctor that kept saying it is nothing else but Cancer, and kept going on and on how to cope with this disease. The patient decided to go along; I mean that doctor was like a used cars salesman trying to convince the poor buyer that this is the deal of century. He suggested another full Ct Scan, called the Pet Scan which covers the whole body and this of course has to have appetizers with it or before taking it; liquids and such that makes the patient afterward wants to live in the bathroom to get rid of all these liquids. The exam was done and the professor was amazed again, it seems that this doctor keeps getting amazed every time he conducts or orders an exam as a first year medical student. This is the same doctor that asked me in previous articles If I were in the medical field when I questioned the necessity of all these exams and I said no and that I belong to another "distinguished" profession; Law. Maybe they got scared when I mentioned Law and decided to do all the necessary and the unnecessary exams just in case, they thought maybe that this person might be trouble. The necessity has always been for patients to have a PCP-Primary Care Physician- that would act like the straw in a drink, or like the hub and the point of contact and would act on behalf of the patients to coordinate all types of exams and then address with eh patient. If you do not have a PCP or a qualified PCP then you might be in trouble because of the contradictions sometimes in the diagnosis and the contradiction in providing the information or channeling it accurately to the patient. Another important job for the PCP in my opinion is to provide a history of the patient and include the emotional part of the treatment. Sickness sometimes might look like a serious disease but it might turn to be something that the patient was born with or something that looks like a serious disease I am concerned about millions of people who go away victims to medical malpractice, ignorance, and doctors/students experiments. I think medical institutions should have like some restaurants a quality control department that would check the food and the dishes before delivering to their customers. The PCP can act in this capacity but in the same time, the hospital must do the same. Prevention in everything is paramount, meaning to try to predict things before happening and put the necessary measures to prevent and then act swiftly once they happen, because you would have a process in place. Prevention, predictability like any business in the name of the game, I say business because medicine is a multi billion dollars business in the USA and you cannot ignore this fact, but it is the business of life, and therefore the measure must be elevated to the highest level of transparency, competency, prevention, predictability, accuracy, and thoroughness. Might cost at the front end, but when it comes to the bottom line it will save tremendous amount of money but most importantly, it will save lives, even if it saves one human being.