Thanks D,
This Article by Doug Monroe was in the issue of Atlanta Magazine I received yesterday.
I had to type it but it was worth it.
I was sitting in the emergency room of Piedmont Hospital a few weeks back admiring the color and size of my right ankle, which was bright red, growing and glowing. The emergency room doctor diagnosed the condition as cellulitis. It was an infection that resulted from cortisone shot a dermatologist gave me a couple of days earlier to clear up an itchy spot.
The emergency physician popped a shot of antibiotics into my hip and sent me on my way. As I limped back to my truck, I realized my swollen ankle was the third doctor inflicted malady I’d suffered in the past two years.
The first problem was an allergic reaction to some facial medication prescribed by a different dermatologist. I spread it on my face, which quickly began to puff up. Within a day I looked like Wilson, the volleyball that Tom Hanks befriended in Cast Away. After my face deflated, I went back to the same practice and sustained my second medical injury. I got an ultraviolet light treatment for a spot of psoriasis on my elbow. The technician prepared my arm with some kind of sauce to intensify the light’s effect, sort of like spraying PAM on a frying pan before you fry a pork chop.
I received a second degree-burn, the kind that produces dozens of mean little bubbles, which the doctor popped for free a few days later.
I changed dermatologists, and things went fine until I got the cortisone shot that infected my ankle. I’ve had the ankle examined by three doctors since then and may need surgery.
I also went to see a psychiatrist a while back. He prescribed an antidepressant. After I started taking it, I began packing on weight, peaking at nearly 260. I looked like I was separated at birth from Louie Anderson. Talk about being depressed! The man is hideous. I mentioned the weight gain to the psychiatrist. Like many modern psychiatrists, he was looking at his wrist to see when my 20 minutes were up so he could see the next impotent fat person taking his antidepressants. The doctor said the medicine didn’t cause the weight gain.
That wasn’t true, of course. I quit taking the medicine, went on a diet and lost nearly 60 pounds. Of course, a lot of that was water weight – from the tears. After I got off the pills, I cried like Jimmy Swaggart for a couple of weeks, but now I barely whimper.
The episode taught me something important: The Pillsbury Doughboy is simply a breadstick on antidepressants.
Overall, I count myself lucky. The father of a friend went to an eye doctor in Marrietta who told him to go see a specialist in Atlanta right away. The specialist rushed my friend’s father into his office that very day, zapping him with a barrage of laser blasts that blinded his left eye on the spot. No extra charge!
Last summer I went to the funeral of an old friend who went into a hospital with a kidney stone and came out dead, apparently the result of too much anesthesia.
So when exactly was it that American medicine went into the tank? It’s easy to blame the monsters who run the Managed Care industry. And I do. But there’s something even more sinister at work. The whole health care establishment has taken a dark turn. All I want is to go to a doctor without having to go to another doctor to get over the first visit. God forbid you should go into a hospital, with all those super-germs gobbling up antibiotics like Pac-Man.
I remember the days when doctors were the most venerated people in town. They worked hard, they did well financially and they were beloved and respected figures. Many of today’s physicians are being reduced to clerk like drudges by managed care. No wonder they’re such lousy doctors. They are depressed. And they can’t get proper treatment for their depression because the psychiatrists are drudges and clock-watchers like the rest of the medical profession.
Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are being priced out of the market. Managed care only covers a few visits anyway. A psychiatrists told me a couple of years ago that psychoanalysis is “ caviar for the generals “ -- the only people who get it are psychiatrists. And what do they need it for? All they do is write prescriptions and say ‘ Next .”
The rest of us get therapy from licensed clinical social workers, of all people. What are you going to tell a social worker—that a MARTA token costs too much?
It’s no wonder that people are throwing up their hands and turning to alternative medicine. I go to a chiropractor and a massage therapist and pay them directly out of my checkbook. I talk to a shrink in Florida on the phone and mail the payment. And a couple of times a month, I go see Bill Stanton, a health-care contrarian who runs bill Stanton’s health Market in Lindbergh Plaza.
When I was swollen with fat on antidepressants, I asked Stanton what diet I could get on to combat my various medical problems. I gave him a rundown. I expected him to say that I should eat a little bowl of frilly green lettuce three times a day.
“ Go on dr. Atkins,” he said.
“ are you kidding?” I said. “ That’s pure meat! Everybody says that’s the unhealthiest diet you can be on.”
He wasn’t kidding. He also put me on some other things as well, including Oil of Oregano and some stuff to counteract the cholesterol. I began to lose weight and I also noticed that my skin problems and a ghastly intestinal condition were clearing up---without medicine.
I was getting better by being on a diet that was 180 degrees at odds with conventional medical wisdom. Stanton contends that nutritional deficiency is the basic underlying cause of disease. But he is not stuck on Dr. Atkins. In fact, I was talking to him the other day when he suggested another customer go on a vegetarian diet.
Stanton grew up near a cotton field treated with DDT and suffered for years while doctors plied him with steroids and antobiotics. He turned away from conventional medicine and got into the natural health field to save his own life. Americans, he says, have now reached the point of medical Darwinism---it’s every patient for himself. “ If you really want to get well, you have to evolve beyond the current medical establishment,” he says. “ You cannot get well by going to medicine.”
I consider my forays into alternative medicine to be experimental. Although I’ve been getting better following Stanton’s suggestions, I still find myself drawn back to conventional physicians. But I have noticed a big difference between the medical doctors and my friend at the vitamin store.
Bill Stanton hasn’t hurt me yet. |
