I just had an eye opening visit to my doctor that I want to share in this blog.
To set the stage, I had a back ache high in my back that caused me to have to stoop down significantly to stop the pain. I had not had a back ache this bad in years. I am 80 years old and fell, cut, split and haul the wood to heat my home and I had done a little too much so I went to the doctor at a clinic near me. The bill for the visit was approximately $5,000. The government paid most, but I was still left with almost $1,000 which I refused to pay.
Here is the punch line. After the visit and having gotten zero medication or treatment, I decided to take two Aleve and within about four hours my back stopped hurting and has not hurt again in several since. I contend that my doctor was incompetent, but I got a letter from the clinic that stated that the bill had been reviewed and they stood behind it as being correct.
The reason for this blog is not to make a personal complaint, but to point out a very serious problem with our medical system. First off, the doctor did not discuss the cost of any of the procedures or why they might be needed in my case. An example was that he did a test to see if I had prostate cancer. I have done some research since and have found no connection between prostate cancer and back aches. This is only one of the problems. It appears that doctors do not know what the cost of the tests that they authorize are going to cost. As a former professor who taught Decision Theory at a major university, it would seem to me that any medical decision would have to take cost into account. I have talked to others about their medical experience and they also confirm that most doctors have no idea what the different procedures cost. How can a doctor do their job if they have no idea what things cost so that they can determine if they are "worth it" or not. In this case, I did not challenge the doctor about his judgement of the probabilities of having different root causes for my back ache, but I know that he was also incompetent in statistics as well. I should have challenged him on his understanding of Bayes Theorem and it application to medical diagnosis, but I am sure he had never heard of Bayes Theorem.
My reason for this blog is make my readers aware of the serious problem within the medical community in the USA that has the major impact of increasing the cost of medical services and yields so little in terms of impact on our health or life expectancy. I view most doctors as being little more than "cooks" who pretend to be "chefs" but only cook by recipes in the cook books they got from medical school. Where is their common sense?
