Among the numerous
negative consequences for the survivors of the Chinese Covid-19 epidemic is the
change in the practice of medicine and the lack of care extended to the rest of
the population that did not get infected but needed medical care for so many
other ailments that went untreated during the forced lockdown at the state and local
levels.
The media
kept lying to us every day how hospitals are overwhelmed with sick people yet
thousands of nurses and doctors were furloughed, some were hired back, some weren’t,
and others decided to retire instead of fighting the new twilight zone medical
practice with all its CDC imposed infection controls and non-medical “social
distancing,” arbitrarily set at 6 feet.
For the last
five months, this “social distancing” has revealed itself as purposeful “social
isolation” often going as far as forcing people to park their cars every other
space in the parking lot, or use every other commode or sink in a public
restroom.
We should
not complain, at least some restrooms were open and we did not have to search
in vain. In parks, they’ve closed them in April and the governor ordered port-o-potties
brought in which the park rangers sprayed with Lysol in the morning in order to
prevent the spread of Covid-19. The public restrooms, we were told, would have
been too hard to sanitize.
And anglers
could no longer fish on the pier, it was decreed, they had to scatter around
the river bank. They promptly congregated under the railroad bridge, six feet
apart or not, to share tall fishing tales.
People already
afraid for their lives and driven into a panic by the non-stop public service
announcements and the non-stop hyping of the casualties on all channels and 24-hour
cable news, became so afraid to leave their homes that a trip to the “infectious”
hospital was out of the question and suffered in silence locked in their homes.
A few suffered heart attacks and, if they were lucky, survived to talk about
it.
All my doctors
kept sending me emails and text messages informing me that they will treat their
patients now exclusively by various HIPAA-compliant tele-conferencing programs online,
no doubt tele-pretending to treat my existing or future problems.
I am
supposed to take my own blood pressure, how many times a minute I breathe, my
oxygen intake at that moment, etc. Perhaps I need to buy other diagnostic
machines normally found in a doctor’s office like a frontal temperature
monitor, an EKG, and an oximeter. I draw the line at becoming my own
phlebotomist.
It is sad to
contemplate what would happen to our formerly stellar medical care now that one
politicized virus has changed entirely the face of our country, including education,
jobs, medical care, entertainment, travel, commerce, and professional sports.
Only politics remained as corrupt as ever.
I can’t say
that I will shed a tear for the demise of professional sports and of their
highly paid players, but I am saddened that Americans will die before their
time because of the lack of proper medical attention as the governors are
forcing us indoors to escape Covid-19 until the expensive vaccine comes out.
Additionally,
where will the rest of the world with large bank accounts come to treat their
complicated medical problems their socialized medical systems can’t fix, if the
best and the brightest American doctors and world-renowned surgeons are no
longer practicing normal medicine but tele-pretending care?
There are
still doctors out there replacing knees and setting broken bones and performing
other surgeries that improve people’s lives, but general practitioners and some
specialists are now switching their practice to tele-work, never touching their
patients. Is this the kind of medicine we want?
Perhaps some
of us are happier with this set up – no travel to someone’s office, no contact,
no wait, etc. Except on a recent tele-conference with one of my doctors, I had
to wait for her to show up online for more than an hour! A canned message kept
telling me that she is tending to another patient and I should be patient.
We will
never know how many Americans suffered at home because they were too afraid to
go to a hospital for treatment, did not want to be on the Covid-19 tracing
network and possibly home on an ankle bracelet if positive and refusing to sign
self-quarantine documents, or did not have elective surgery because were unable
to find a doctor who would do the surgery they needed and thus continued to suffer
in pain and misery.
I am
thankful for my mom’s doctor who treated her with the proper cocktail of
medicines, HCQ, Z-pack, oxygen, and zinc and she survived her bout with
pneumonia. But I wish some general practitioners and specialists in my town
would get back to real medicine instead of hiding behind a computer and tele-pretending
to practice medicine. Stop being afraid of your patients and please make eye
contact with them, they are not body snatchers.