E-med4u

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With this section, I am attempting to provide the public with first, an alert: medical care is drastically below standards, today, and secondly, how you may learn to become an assertive, confident consumer of healthcare, for yourself and your loved ones. It is going to take "a village" to change this mess, but nothing daunts us if we must save lives.

Technology changes our lives or affects us in some way every day. We can see it happening right before our eyes. Medicine is no different. A few years into the new millennium "e-Care" can begin if the government doesn't interfere and use healthcare as their smoke screen for other non-essential activities. The patients will not have to go to their physicians but can be tested and scanned at home, or in their offices, by a physician competent to answer their questions, trained in telemetry, and able to make diagnoses. It behooves patients, and we are all patients at some time in our lives, to be as prepared to find the health care we trust, need, and the models most comfortable for us. 

Believe it or not, quality of life will begin to improve, and we will see how technology is improving our lives—for the first time. We will also realize that there is another component to healing, besides the physician, diagnosis, and treatment protocol.

LEGAL RIGHTS: At the same time, every patient must insist on privacy, and ask their doctors and hospitals who has access to their medical records, beside your insurance companies. Do you know that you can cross out "and other..." etc. in the HIPPA release you are asked to sign, after it reads you give permission for your records to be given to your insurance company (ies)? If it goes on to state a blanket list of organizations, etc. with no names, cross that out, and initial it in the margin, and squeeze in the date. That blanket sentence, about "other individuals and organizations we deal with," etc. includes relieving doctors, nurses, the hospital or group fundraising program, and any list services they may be paid to release your personal and private information. IF you are in doubt, cross out everything except giving information to your own insurance companies, "none other." When you sign it, add under your signature, "Signature dependent on my attorney's approval" and cram the date in next, not over in the "date box."

If you cannot see, or read, do not settle for anyone from the hospital reading it to you. Request an "outside attorney," but its still best if you have even one physician that you highly trust. With our mobility of the populace, people moving all over, the ill, handicapped, aged, and poor are at high risk in hospitals today. Remember, if you are poor and on Medicaid, you should have a red carpet rolled out for you because you are guaranteed income to that hospital.

ADVICE: Always have an attorney and let that person know if you are entering the hospital or as soon as you can, and if you cannot afford an attorney, contact your church, the local legal aid center, if you are disabled, contact your state's Adult and Disabled Abuse Division of the state department of health for an advocate, such as Steve Gold, Attorney,  who runs The Disability Odyssey Continues, and Bob Kafka, both very helpful with information for the disabled. Be sure to visit Steve's website, first, you may want to subscribe to his incredibly informative letters.

Recently, I wondered how I could reach Steve Gold (or anyone) when I was in an ER without a bell cord or telephone, and knew the doctor was wither not able to understand me (no English as a medical specialty Resident no less), or wouldn't wait for my answers, and I am legally blind, handicapped physically (post-polio syndrome, which can cause serious low blood sugar), and have short-term memory loss due to multiple head injuries.  I even removed my finger cot oxygen monitor, and after 31 minutes no one came in to help me. I had asked about just that: What do I do if I need help? The RN said, "Yell, we'll hear you." Well, you try being in that situation, much less over the noise of their laughing and chatter at the nurses station, not able to see anything but shadows, and fear falling out of the bed, or whatever I was place upon, with needles in my arms. I knew that even the doctor whom I was with who called EMS would have been terrified about me, had he known, but I had no way to contact anyone. As it turned out, after a day in the hospital, with tests that were negative, I was still discharged with the same serious diagnosis, (plus they did none of the well-publicized tests to determine if that was my diagnosis) that was proven seriously incorrect, thanks to the aforementioned doctor procuring a specialist for me to see in short order.

RESOURCES: If you encounter a problem with an ER, hospital, or doctor, wait until you can contact someone else, say nothing (regardless of HIPPA, doctors talk to each other and some blackball patients, and they'll never be diagnosed, I've heard them do it) but contact anyone who you know cares about you, another doctor, a psychologist, advocacy center, anyone, and request that they make a referral to someone they know is an excellent physician. When you see that person, only take your discharge papers or anything you received from another doctor, and any medical records you have at home (always requests your medical reports, tests, copies of letters from one doctor to another and just pop them in a file folder labeled "Medical Reports" so you can take that with you—but don't say a word about the prior physician, hospital, or your care, only that you wanted to see someone for a consultation who was reported to you as being highly competent. Later on, you may pursue action. If you live in Texas, contact the office of Windell Turley, Personal Injury Attorney, in Dallas. These attorneys will usually have an RN take your information, and tell you how to obtain your medical records, or records of anything, like an auto accident, faulty merchandise, wheelchair ramps, unsafe autos, etc. and then they will review your case and let you know what, if anything, can be done.

If you do not have a "next of kin" you want notified, just write down, "The best doctor you can find," but do everything you can to write our your Instructions to Physicians, and have a Medical Power of Attorney you trust (children are not the best options). Most legal aid centers, senior centers, and attorneys in general will help you draw these up, for little of nothing depending on your circumstances.

If physicians cannot move to a more common sense humane medical model, opposed to the male medical model of health care they have always had, they will be in the control of the pharmaceutical and insurance corporations, and will not be permitted to practice medicine in the way many physicians truly want to practice. That is already the case when doctors form their own corporations. They are now at the mercy of "drug company draft picks" that will be discussed later. The insurance companies are working with the pharmaceutical companies. It is the health care consumers who are shocked at the activities of the health care industry.

Politics plays a key role and when anything becomes a political football it is because no one is willing to fight for what is right and ethical. Money becomes the "driver." We know the infamous adage, "bad things happen because good people fail to act." Well, patients, and caring, ethical physicians must act in spite of any political actions against caring for ourselves and our neighbors. Such horrors we have seen in the past seven years under this Congress and Administration are only the tip of the iceberg. Planning has been ongoing for several decades. Patients and well-meaning physicians must organize and act, now, along with organizations that protect the public trust, for common good..

It is a travesty that the medical profession is not policing itself, indeed, lobbying for Tort Reform so patients who have been inexcusably harmed by a physician cannot receive financial remuneration a Jury decides is fair and just. If a doctor complains about his or her liability insurance costs, find an other doctor, or at least check that doctor's credentials, even Google them by putting in a search using the doctor's name, and contact their state board of medical examiners for that physician's credentials file.

At the same time, a patient may write to the president of a hospital, medical school, copying the State Board of Medical Examiners, and clearly state what happened to you. In that letter, write, "I am requesting a review of this physician's actions, and regardless of the outcome, this letter is to go into this physician's Credentials File." If you do not receive any response, keep writing, and sending the copies of the same letters to the same group, and on the third attempt, copy your local newspaper, and state this is your third attempt.

You may have to be persistent. I am still trying to get a response from the president of a regional cancer center regarding his PET interpretation-physician who wrote a seriously wrong diagnosis of metastatic cancer to another organ, and yet didn't mention something that looked even worse. Thanks to my own cancer team, for their wise assessment, and the radiologist who does second readings on all of my scans...for putting everything up on the Internet from the past three years, for many specialists to view and comment. But, all of this took more MRIs, and CT scans, and three months of my own agony, fearing cancer had returned.

I've yet to have an answer to four letters to said "president" of this regional cancer center, and the bloke keeps charging me for the insurance difference, $21.70, for the past eighteen months now, and threatening to sue me. Unless the medical profession begins to police their colleagues and become more committed to honesty it must lose the right to be called a profession—a profession "polices" itself by definition. As with any other business practice, if medicine does not become entrepreneurial and still retain an obvious consciousness of caring they are not going to survive and will have to go the way of other corporate failures and be swept up into another model of care.

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           rev 08/16/08