With so many doctors, HMOs, and other interests squarely in opposition to a national health care system, claiming that it would lower the quality of health care in this country, it’s interesting to read an article this morning which exposes the sad fact:
Americans have a slightly better than 50-50 chance their medical problems will be addressed in an optimal way when they visit a doctor’s office or enter a hospital, according to a new survey.
The failure to do the right thing — or, more precisely, all the right things — extends across the spectrum of activities physicians are expected to perform.
I’ve personally witnessed this shortcoming twice lately, with potentially devastating results.
Last year at this time, my mother was taken to the local hospital in terrible pain. They gave her pain medication and sent her home. In the night she became violently ill and had to be driven by ambulance 100 miles to Norfolk hospital, where they discovered that she had a large kidney stone which had blocked her system, poisoning her blood and causing a life-threatening condition. She was in the hospital for two weeks, in intensive care. The original hospital didn’t bother to take a sonogram or make any attempt to ascertain the scope of the problem.
Something similar happened a month or so ago. One of my co-workers went to the emergency room in pain, and after waiting for hours, was sent away with meds. The next day, she went to another hospital where it was discovered that she had a burst appendix, and she was admitted. One thing led to another and soon she had a chest tube to drain fluid in her lungs and was fighting life-threatening conditions. She was in the hospital for three weeks.
If this sort of sloppiness and misdiagnosis has happened to two people I know lately, how often must it be happening?
