Living in San Francisco, all this is even more true. We have some of the best medical facilities and doctors in the world. We should kiss the ground beneath our feet to be so fortunate to have this great care. So why is this patient impatient?
I have lived with several life threatening diseases for at least 25 years. I have had five heart attacks, as many surgical procedures including two open-heart surgeries. I also have diabetes and perhaps resultant kidney failure. The three different diseases are highly interactive.
It is incumbent on such a patient to monitor several functions every so often. For kidney and diabetes progress, one must look at blood test results. For kidney function one needs to know the BUN level, the creatinine clearance, the potassium level (which is also very important for heart patients to know) and finally the red blood cell count since that is controlled by enzymes produced in the kidneys. For diabetes one should check the A1C levels every three months to ensure that the long-term blood sugar level is acceptable. For the heart there are tests for cholesterol levels and there are echo exams to be done on a yearly basis to see if the heart tissue is losing its ability to pump blood through the body.
A patient should take these tests when needed but more importantly, the patient must get the results of the tests. Just as schools give students tests not only to determine whether they are learning the material and to decide whether they should continue to the next grade, but also to give feedback to the students so that students can make adjustments in study habits or test-taking strategies. It is a necessary part of the learning process.
Modern medicine has not yet learned this lesson and neither have most patients. The medical establishment unlike that of education, acts as though their practice is strictly top down. The doctor who has studied calculus, physics and chemistry in addition to biology must decide what tests to give and then must review them to advise the patient what to do next. The patient is better off just doing what s/he is told by this master of science.
Besides the obvious problem of taking the main character out of the play by restricting the patient’s knowledge of his own condition and progress to generalities like “a little above normal” or “within the range” or “nothing to be too worried about, yet,” instead of getting the actual data like blood test reports, Echo exams, stress tests, etc., there is a more basic one. Nowadays, your doctor is seeing one patient every 15 minutes. If s/he is a specialist who usually sees each patient twice a year, that doctor has more than 1,000 patients. If you are a patient, you have only one patient to worry about - yourself. Doctors, because of their overload of cases, can easily miss reviewing a test result or miss important parts of the report.
Also, with specialization being what it is, a patient may have to see several different doctors. They may need to see the information presented in a blood test given by another doctor. It would help if the patient had a copy of the test to show the other doctor.
Also with the burnout rate in the medical field, it is very likely that soon you will have a different doctor. The new doctor may not have a copy of tests given by a predecessor in another practice. A patient who keeps copies of all medical test results would have this data available to share with the new physician.
We shouldn’t have to wait patiently for our tests results any longer. These tests are given to us, for us, from us and are paid for by us. We have every reason and right to expect to receive them when they are available for our information and future reference.
We are patients, but please do not try our patience.
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