SPACE FILLER

I am planning to write a blog or two about Health Care in the second decade of the 21^st Century. My problem is in organizing what I wish to say into a concise coherent document.  There is such a multitude of facets involved in today’s health care and most of those that have the greatest impact have no relationship to the patient or the “provider”.

The term “Provider” is one that the sociologists coined in the 70/80s to9 include all who rendered care. This meant primarily Physicians, Therapists, Nurses and Institutions etc.  All were no longer professionals but rather merchants of a particular product.

That one term represented the death of good health care in the USA. I am not referring to what can be done or to the great technical advances but rather to what it means to you as a potential patient.

Meanwhile while I turn and toss on this subject; knowing that the best jokes are the ones you can tell about yourself,  I would like to quit today with a few more anecdotes from those  early years.

House calls in those days (1950-60) were a way of life, as was 24hr. availability. The phone was by my bedside and even in deep sleep I became conditioned to picked it up on the first ring. Often my wife never knew that I had left the house during the night.

One night I had to make a house call on Hoes Lane in Piscataway, a very rural area in the 50s. I was given the location of a house and told that I should go to the rear. When I arrived, I saw a lantern light in the window of a building about 100 feet in the fields behind the house. I walked down the path with my bag and got close to the building when I heard a cow moo. It was a barn. The house had two apartments. They meant by” the rear” was that the entrance to their apartment on the second floor was by outside stairs in the back.

Another time, I was awakened by a patient’s phone call who said” I have bitten my husband. It is an emergency; and would I come immediately”. I dressed and was part way over there when I started to laugh, for the first time it dawned upon me what she had said. When I arrived, she met me at the door and repeated her comment. They were having a fight, and she had bitten him.  It was not serious and certainly not worth my losing sleep.

Of course there was the alcoholic who called about 2am and said;" Doc I can't sleep". I was rude and replied, " Now I too can't sleep". End of conversation but not that patient.