My mom had surgery a couple of months ago to remove a benign cist from her neck. It was an outpatient surgery that only took a couple of hours, but she had to stay in the recovery room for a while because she is diabetic, to ensure that she didn’t have a complication. When she received the itemized bill for that one day it costed her $2,ooo just to be in a recovery room for a few hours. They didn’t even check her blood sugar level before or after the surgery but charged her ins. company $2,000 just to be in a recovery room. They only came in once to taker her temp. and blood pressure and we had to ask for something to drink and eat for her. OUTRAGEOUS!!!

And you know, we already have a bunch of government cooks in the healthcare kitchen. (Oddly enough, when I read that real quick it popped into my head as “government kooks”. Freudian mindslip there.)

Needless to say she changed doctors immediately

Your comment about doing the research on your own jogged my memory about something I read in April. Obama told the NY Times:

I know how to ask good questions of my doctor. But ultimately, he’s the guy with the medical degree. So, if he tells me, You know what, you’ve got such-and-such and you need to take such-and-such, I don’t go around arguing with him or go online to see if I can find a better opinion than his.

And so, in that sense, there’s always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider. And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options.

Doctors already offer uneven and sometimes questionable treatment plans. The thought of government cooks crowding into the health care kitchen to “evaluate treatment options” is not a pretty one. I’s rather see more personal responsibility among health care consumers.

With my situation… it’s not the first time I’ve had problems with my medical care. In my experience, most doctors don’t care to let people know exactly what the risks are with medications they’re recommending (tending to simply say “oh, side effects are mild” or something equally vague, then you read that you could have a stroke while on the medication) and they have no clue how supplements work. If you want to get really good information on how supplements work, you’ll have to do the research on your own or go talk to someone in “granola-head” store (or both).

From the time I was 12 until I was 18, I couldn’t walk long distances or play sports due to what my PCP told me was a broken toe that hadn’t healed properly. When I finally sought out a specialist, it turned out I had a condition in which part of the bone in one toe had died and little fragments were chipping off and causing me pain when I walked. I had surgery a few days later to remove the detached pieces and in less than a month I could go hiking. That experience gave me a healthy skepticism about the infallibility of doctors and a lesson in the importance of really taking control of your medical care.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I was told that I was “nearly borderline” anemic (I’ve had a history of anemia nearly all my life) and was recommended to take 375 mg of an over-the-counter Iron suppliment. The RDA of Iron for a pregnant woman is 20 mg. Pregnant women already very commonly have issues with constipation, etc, and the number one cause of childhood poisoning in the home is from Iron overdose when a child gets into the medicine cabinet and swallows a bunch of vitamins. And they were recommending that a pregnant woman, growing a baby, take over 18 times the RDA of Iron for pregnant women.

I did the research and , against my husband’s preferences, settled on 10 mg of a liquid herbal Iron supplement, one easily processed by the body. I also learned that taking calcium or fiber within 2 hours of Iron hinders the body’s ability to absorb and process Iron, that there are certain chemicals in oatmeal and black tea that do the same, and that the body needs Vitamin C in order to process Iron properly. None of these things were conveyed to me by the medical staff recommending such a high dose of Iron. They and my husband were concerned that I wasn’t taking their advice, but my Iron levels were normal within a few days, without all the horrible side-effects of taking too much Iron.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that people really need to take some responsibility for their own health. People rely far too heavily on the “knowledge” and the advice of doctors.