When a patient tells you he drinks 18 to 24 Cokes a day, you might have the same reaction I had.
“You mean 18 to 24 ounces, right?”
“No, 18 to 24 cans of Coke each day,” he says.
You’ve GOT to be kidding me. I think we’ve discovered where the diabetes came from. In terms of calories, that’s about 1800 to 2400 calories per day of Coca Cola. Thankfully, once he cut out the Coke, his blood sugar quickly came under control, and he shed not only half his weight but his metformin prescription, as well.
This bring up two important points:
- Where was this guy’s doctor?
and
- Why do we insist on throwing medicines at people perfectly capable of fixing their problems with out them?
It has been said that at a typical appointment, a patient will have around five minutes of face time with their physician. If you’re not prepared, you may blink and miss them. It makes perfect sense, though, and you can hardly blame them for it. Healthcare has become a volume-based business, like agriculture before it. The viability of a practice depends on the number of patients seen in a day. The unfortunate consequence of the revolving door is poor patient care and polypharmacy, the practice of prescribing medication upon medication to spirit away all of a patient’s complaints. In the end, polypharmacy results in a cycle of treating the side effects of Drug A with Drug B and those of Drug B with Drug C which may or may not interact with Drug A causing an increase in the side effects of Drug A.
And thanks to direct-to-consumer advertising, we’ve all heard the narrators rattle off an intimidating list side effects to contact your doctor about.
I guess this is why I wanted to go into healthcare.
3 years ago
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Today I start a blog out of sheer wonder and bewilderment at the state of education in America. Not only does the United States consistantly fall well below most other developed countries in terms of literacy and higher education, today the Midas man lost my car keys at some point between pulling my car out of the garage and ringing me up at the register. The only way to describe my feelings toward this unfortunate incident is “utterly despondant and heartbroken for future generations of Americans.” The poor guys searched the entire garage and surrounding area to no avail and finally had to have a new key made. Now, as I sit in the waiting room, I realize the real idiot is me for not having a spare set of car keys.
3 years ago
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