Medical treatment is a complex science.
Figuring out how to proceed to a cure from a pain in the foot or a twitch in the corner of the mouth or a nose imitating Niagara Falls requires deep knowledge and years of trial-and-error experimentation.
To be clear, I am not talking about the difficult road physicians must take to a cure. They seem to have treatment mostly figured out. I mostly don’t.
Years ago the science of being a patient was much simpler.
Back in those days, I had this single person in charge of keeping me healthy — or curing me if I wasn’t. He simply called himself a doctor.
Sometimes other doctors got fancy on the sign in front of their office and called themselves a “general practitioner” or a “family doctor,” but that was just marketing. My doctor didn’t need a label because he knew everything there was to know about medicine — even more than his descendant, Dr. Google.
When I went to his office with an ailment, he gave me a penicillin shot and told me to take an aspirin, drink plenty of water and rest. I eventually got better.
He also was a lot older than me, or maybe I was just a lot younger than he was, but I knew he was a good doctor because he was old. When I asked him a question, he said comforting things like “You are young and healthy. That leg should grow back in a few years.”
Then about 50 years ago (just a rough estimate) my doctor quit or died. (I don’t know the cause; probably a penicillin reaction.)
The woman who replaced him called herself an “internist.” I didn’t know what that meant but she kept prescribing me various pills every time I went to her office.
In time, however, I found she mainly was a “traffic controller” — somewhat like the air traffic controllers President Ronald Reagan fired when they asked for a raise in pay back in the early 1980s. When the pills failed, she had a lot of “ologists” she could send me to for a cure.
This flock of auxiliary physicians had signs on their doors that identified them by whatever part of my body they specialized in; orthopedists, urologists, neurologists, cardiologists, gastroenterologists, ophthalmologists, dermatologists, rheumatologists, hematologists — to name a few.
And when the bills came I discovered each “ologist” had sub-contracted me to a whole lot other “ologists” I would never meet; radiologists, pathologists, anesthesiologists.
In summary, the string of “ologists” seemed endless.
These “ologists” had a lot of deep knowledge about one or the other specific parts of my body. I soon learned that if I had a pain in my foot and my internist sent me to an orthopedist, I had a bone problem. If she sent me to a neurologist I had a pinched nerve or possibly brain cancer — which would have required me to see an oncologist.
If she sent me to a rheumatologist, I had arthritis. If she sent me to a urologist, the pain was coming from an inflammation somewhere in my urinary system and was radiating down my leg.
My cardiologist would tell me to take an aspirin every day for my heart and my hematologist would warn me never to take aspirin because my blood was slow to clot and I could bleed to death.
If all else failed, the internist could send me to a psychiatrist to see if I had post traumatic stress disorder and was making up my foot pain. Of course, appointments with a psychiatrist were likely booked out for a year or two, so his nurse practitioner would need to refer me to a psychologist for some talk therapy to help me cope with the wait.
The radiologist’s x-ray eventually might find the splinter in my heel and I would be cured with a referral to a splinterologist, I suppose.
I guess we could call this medical progress.
I realize some of the “ologists” today know more and have better diagnosis and treatments than the doctor I once consulted in an office he maintained in his family home in Flat Rock. They likely even know more than Dr. Google, whose specialty is to inform me I am likely to die soon from whatever I want diagnosed.
Still, I miss those simple days of one-stop medical treatment. Old Doc Whatshisname would have just pulled a pair of tweezers out of his white lab coat and yanked out the splinter.
Then he would have given me a penicillin shot and told me to take an aspirin, drink plenty of water and rest.
Bud Herron is the retired former publisher of The Republic and the former editor and publisher of the Daily Journal in Franklin. Contact him at [email protected].
