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.

Your Genetic Code and Yugo

“The best doctor is the one you run to and can’t find.”  - Denis Diderot

1987 Yugo GV, Los Angeles, Ca ( Photo: Wikipedia)

Your genetic code blue print has finally caught up with you. You were not after all the Mercedes you thought you were, you are just a cheap Yugo. For those of you born after the demise of this wonderful piece of communist engineering, a Yugo was a Yugoslavian made car, just shy of a lawn mower and an East German Trabant, a real Rocket made of plastic and fiberglass, quite safe in an accident, I am sure. Aside from the top speed of 40 MPH, this Yugo started losing its parts, bumpers, and doors as soon as you drove it off the car lot where you had dropped about $2,000 on a bare bones model, emphasis on rickety bones.

In spite of all the vegetarian and vegan diets, the gluten free and organic groceries you ingested, jogging yourself to exhaustion, yoga-ing yourself into a pretzel that perspires, hums, and farts, you have become your mother with her endless supply of transdermal patches for joint pain.  Ben Gay has become your perfume of necessity.

You are finally at the mercy of sorry insurance that does not pay a dime for physical therapy if Medicare says that you can only have $1,900 worth of physical therapy per year. Should you need more, you must be completely bedridden and then, after the insufficient extension, since you are obviously bedridden, you cannot make any more measurable progress, so they cut you off entirely. So much for taking care of its citizens who have worked hard in a steel mill, in other manufacturing sectors, or sat for endless hours in front of a computer screen where repetitive motions have caused havoc to their joints.

You have been told that you must pass the Affordable Care Act first before you know what’s in it. And you thought that was a reasonable thing to do. After all, would 100 percent Democrats who passed the bill on Christmas 2010 lie to you?

You are beginning to find out and you don’t like it because you can’t afford it even though you gave up your coffee shop lattes and your favorite wines and the government gave you enough subsidies to cover most of the premiums but conveniently forgot to tell you that you are going to be taxed each year on those subsidies. They knew nobody would read almost three thousand pages of gibberish legalese. People hardly read one book anymore unless it has numerous shades of perversion in it.

The Millennials who thought and voted for everyone to have free socialized medical care and, thinking that they could get away without paying for this expensive insurance on account of their youth and because it’s a free country, are finding out the hard way that they must be insured and that medical care will be available to them only after they pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets first.

Wait, didn’t our President promise us that insurance will be so cheap, it will be practically free and we can keep our doctors? Apparently you have been duped! But, don’t worry, once your other hero you support so lovingly and devotedly, Hillary, is elected president in 2016, she will give you Marxist insurance for free and all the abortions your dark hearts and empty skulls will desire.

Should you find yourselves suddenly sleeping on beds of nails instead of on comfortable contoured-to-your-aching-body beds, you have nobody else to blame but yourselves. It may sound mean, but you should reap what you’ve sown. The rest of us are hapless victims of your naiveté and misguided activism.

You are in pain and in need of medical care? Too bad, you are not important in the scheme of things, not a minority, the wrong ethnicity, or too old and you must go home and take an aspirin, there are endless millions of young illegal arrivals from other nations every month who are going to get free medical care ahead of you, paid with your hard-earned taxpayer dollars. Take a number and get to the back of the line!

And if you lose your job or your hours are cut back because your employer can no longer afford to insure all of you under the draconian new insurance rules and regulations mandated by Obama’s Affordable Care Act, you can always join the Obamacare health exchange in your state. The premiums will be much higher than what you were paying on the free market and with way less benefits. And, if you can’t find a doctor to treat you or one that will accept your sorry insurance, you are really in trouble. Make sure you have a good will, a passport, and can afford to fly somewhere else for treatment.

If you are a vet and have served your country honorably wherever the bellicose elites have sent you for measly pay and scant benefits, keep going to the back of the line, you are no heroes, only progressive deviants are; you have been deemed a terrorist by our bureaucrats and we have no interest in treating you.  

Communist medical care

Rationing of everything was a staple of daily life in Romania. We could only have so much before we turned into burgeois society and we had to be kept under control by the dreaded financial police. Nobody was allowed to get ahead in any way and, if there were appearances that a family had acquired something extra, the neighborhood spies would report them to the economic police. What would these neighborhood spies get in return for their service? Usually the right to shop at the communist party stores, with no lines, better food, more variety, and better service. They were given about $150 per month as well. Once the police started the investigation, the family had to prove where and how they obtained the money to buy certain things, usually in excess of the identical salaries, barely scraping by, people earned. This was by design to satisfy the utopian communist ideal that everybody had to be equal except the oligarchy in power. They earned more money, shopped at their own stores, had their own doctors, hospitals, hotels, overseas vacations, Swiss bank accounts, and summer resorts with five star hotels and maid service.

Everyone lived in the same drab, concrete block apartments, the size of a studio apartment in the west. Often times two families had to share a two bedroom apartment with only one kitchen and one bathroom. The spartan conditions extended to medical care as well. By definition, everything was free. Trying to actually get the care, cost quite a bit of money, more than most families earned. There were bribes to see the doctor, bribes to see the nurse, bribes to see the pharmacist, the lab and X-ray technicians. There were bribes for the cleaning lady when the patient was in the hospital. A family member had to stay with the patient 24/7 and take care of everything otherwise the patient was not fed, changed, attended to when in distress, bandages changed, etc. The doctor and the nurse sometimes did not show up for days. A patient would be hospitalized for weeks and would not see a doctor almost the entire time unless bribes were given: bottles of wine, money, foreign chocolate, foreign cigarettes, stockings, shampoo, foreign soap, U.S. dollars, jewelry, etc. Doctors made the same low salaries as any worker and they compensated by violating their Hyppocratic oath and refusing to treat someone unless bribes were given.

The quality of doctors was very questionable since medical school graduates had no practical experience on patients whatsoever only theoretical knowledge. Medical school took six years to complete with no residency requirements. Most patients took their lives into their own hands when they agreed to have elective surgery. When an emergency arose, the outcome was mostly dire. Even simple operations ended in disaster, nipped colons during appendectomies, nipped voice boxes during thyroidectomies, cut blood vessels, ruptured and nicked organs, instruments and bandages left inside the patient, etc. There was no ethical or moral accountability for the death of any human being. Life was worth zero and nobody punished any doctor for malpractice. They were all working for the government, who was the family going to sue for the death of their loved one? The government?

The sanitary conditions were horrible. Bandages were washed,rewashed and reused, needles were boiled in rusty metal pans and so were the glass and metal syringes. Nothing was disposable. When I was in high school, the entire school received injections with the same three needles and syringes. Every morning they were boiled in a pan and the same were used all day until the next morning when they were boiled again. I do mean boiled, they were not autoclaved. I was lucky because my last name started with A so I was the first to get any shot. The rest of my school mates had gotten hepatitis from dirty needles. We were lucky that there was no HIV epidemic yet.

The hospital wards were very dirty and in bad need of repairs and painting. Each ward had anywhere from twenty to thirty metal beds with mattresses stained of blood and other bodily fluids of endless patients who had used the hospitals. The family had to bring sheets and blankets for the patient. The floors were not usually mopped and caked blood and other stains were present. Food was not provided by the hospital and family members had to take turns to bring nourishment and water to the patient every day. No IV fluids were provided.

Each hospital had one ambulance that was equipped with nothing to save lives and did not have an EMT on board. A driver would supplement his salary on the way to an emergency by giving rides to hitchhikers. Most ambulances arrived too late to save someone's life. However, if the patient had non-life threatening emergency, they were lucky to survive the long, uncomfortable, and arduous trip to the hospital in an empty ambulance.

Dental care was non-existent. Nobody was allowed to clean their teeth at the dentist, it was too expensive and too capitalist. The only time we were allowed to make an appointment, if we were lucky, was when someone needed their teeth pulled or a root canal. I still remember the dentist who talked and spit in my mouth when I was 15. He was doing a root canal without any anesthetic, oblivious to my screams of pain and the dripping blood on my clothes. He had nicked the inside of my mouth with the drill. The treatment was stretched over a period of three months. I cannot begin to tell you the pain that this man subjected me to unnecessarily. People tried to avoid the dentist like the plague and did their best to brush their teeth if they could find toothbrushes and toothpaste. Both items were in constant shortage.

There were no such things as tampons or pads. Women had to use rags from old clothes or purchase bags of folded cotton which was also very hard to find. It was considered a pharmaceutical item and in very short supply. It was not uncommon to see women bleed down their legs in public. It was embarassing and mortifying but those were the economic conditions.

Pharmacies compounded most drugs if they had the ingredients; there were a few drugs that were already pre-made in pill form or powder which had to be mixed with water or poured into large paper capsules that were very difficult to swallow. Meds were always in short supply and people had to bribe pharmacists even for vitamins although technically, they were free. When medicine was available, people did not need prescriptions, they could get whatever drugs they thought might cure their pain. There was no such thing as a controlled substance. The government did not care whether people lived or died. We were all considered a burden on society.

The government did care about the number of babies born. Because people died at such a young age due to poor nutrition, hard life in general, and lack of proper medical care, the replacement value of the population was not there. There were more people deceased than there were babies born. Ceausescu's regime decided to reward motherhood with stipends per live born baby and, at the same time, forbade any abortion, period. It became a felony for both the patient and the doctor if a pregnancy ended in abortion, whether it was a spontaneous one or a medical one.

If people could not afford the newborn, the government gladly took them and placed them in state orphanages where they were promptly neglected and barely cared for as human beings. Many women who were raped resorted to back alley abortions and lost their lives as a result. If they went to the emergency room as a result of a botched abortion or a spontaneous one, the law forbade the doctor to give proper treatment without police being present and investigating first. Often women would bleed to death before police arrived or did their criminal investigation. Antibiotics were refused if the woman did not testify who performed the abortion.

My own grandfather and grandmother were victims of the lack of proper medical care. My grandfather had surgery to repair a hernia and they nicked his colon - he died of gangrene in hurendous pain. My grandmother had an ulcer and the village medic gave her aspirin for pain. She bled to death.

My best friend had a tonsillectomy and the doctor cut her voice box - her voice was never the same, she talked like an old man.