Posted by
Steve on Thursday, September 02, 2010 9:00:00 PM
I've been dealing with a health issue for some time now, a bad hip. When I first went to my doctor complaining about it he sent me to a specialist, an orthopedic surgeon. He's competent enough and as a matter of fact he did a carpal tunnel release surgery on my right hand four or five years ago.
Little did I know that visit would be the beginning of a long and painful trip through the looking glass that is modern medicine.
He took some X-rays and said he couldn't see anything that could cause the pain but in some cases back problems manifest themselves in hip pain so off to the hospital to get an MRI. It took a month or so to set up the appointment at our community hospital. The results of the MRI came back and it took a month or so to get another appointment to the specialist to find out the MRI indicated that I have a compressed disc some spinal stenosis, narrowing of the channel the nerve passes though.
The specialist sent me to a back surgeon in Kansas City, it took a couple of months to get an appointment. When I got there they took some X-rays and did some tests. A month later he sent a letter to the first specialist and said he couldn't figure out if it were my back or hip that was causing the problem.
Back to square one.
I went back to the first specialist and he suggested I go to a for-profit surgical center so I made an appointment there to see a back doctor because the first one felt it was my back despite the lack of evidence.
I went to the surgical center - the doctor and I spoke for a bit and he said he thought a different doctor might consider surgery even though he wouldn't do it with me weighing what I did. I saw the second doctor in about 15 minutes after the first doctor. He suggested we take some fresh X-rays since the latest I had were over a year old. They used a digital X-ray machine and I was still standing sideways against the sensor when he said "It's your hip." He said he did back surgery but not joint replacement surgery so he suggested a third doctor at the center. He left and came back in about 10 minutes to have me escorted to the third doctors office. After less than an hour and a half in a for-profit center I had a firm diagnosis of my problem and a sense of when it would be that I could get a replacement hip. It had taken two years of my time and I still never got a firm diagnosis at the community hospital or the not-for-profit centers I had been going to.
Under Obamacare there is no way I could have the kind of service I received in the for-profit surgery center, they will become relics if something isn't done to reverse the health care debacle we are seeing. I don't care if someone is making a profit or not - I just want to stop hurting.