Some Doctors are Tele-Pretending to Practice Medicine

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.