Opus 2026-018: The Doctor Is Waiting

I have an appointment as I write.  I am waiting to see my cardiologist.  I’m going because about 10 years ago I allowed them to put in a pacemaker.  A couple years after that I was diagnosed with A-Fib.  So now I am in this endless round of seeing doctors.  Every time I have a procedure that’s any bigger than cleaning my teeth I need to get clearance from the cardiologist before I can advance.

One of the questions I have is, “Was it a big mistake to get the pacemaker?”  It’s a little late to ask the question now.  I should have asked it a long time ago.  For several years, every doctor I saw was telling me I needed a pacemaker.  When they finally got down to seriously testing me it took them a couple months to find anything to justify insurance paying for it.  They kept looking.  Eventually, they found something.  I went ahead with it.  I’m reasonably convinced that one of the reasons that I have been diagnosed with A-Fib is because I have the pacemaker installed.  I have no evidence for that.  It just seems logical to me.

Which brings me to my question of the unnecessary medical procedures that we submit to in our quest for health.  We have a guy at our church who is 84, soon to be 85, and he’s been having some TIAs, I think they’re called.  They put him on a medication which made it almost impossible for him to walk because he was so woozy.  Was it necessary?  Who knows?  So much of what we do on the advice of doctors is just them experimenting.  I remember years ago when one of my doctors was insisting that I needed to go on vitamin D or I was going to die.  OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point.  Eventually, I started taking vitamin D at seeming relatively harmless level.  Then I went down the road.  Something else came up and one of the things they said was you can’t take vitamin D when you’re taking this medication.  So I stopped taking vitamin D.  I never heard anymore about it until they started talking about how too much vitamin D was unhealthy.  

Doctors go through phases.  There are fads in medicine.  Do they actually carefully consult the research that’s been done?  Do they look at the size of the base on which the analysis is done?  Do they look at the methods used to see if they are valid?  A lot of questions and I’m afraid the answer to all of them is on the wrong side of the scale.  The guy who I was talking about who is 84 was put on something which was having some serious side effects.  He went and consulted Dr. Google, yes, I see you rolling your eyes, and found that there was another medication that theoretically didn’t have some of the problems with this one.  Next time he saw his doctor, he asked about it so the doctor wrote him out of prescription for that.  That is not the end of the story.  It turns out that the one he got the doctor to write in the prescription for was not covered by insurance and so he’s paying $500 for this.  Did the doctor not prescribe it because he knew it would be expensive?  Did the doctor not prescribe it because he didn’t know about it?  We’ll never know.

So I’m going to have my pacemaker checked, do an EKG, the cardiologist will sit down with a couple papers and pretty much say “See you in six months.”  At least that’s what I assume.  Maybe they’ll find some major problem.  You never know.  Once you’re locked into the system, it’s almost impossible to get out.  I think one of the things that I will do, especially after seeing how doctors responded to the COVID nonsense, is to avoid seeing them unless there’s a genuine emergency and I have no choice.

Sounds like a plan to me.

homo unius libri