Treating the Test and the Grip of the Insurance Industry on Medicine

Right now my youngest son is in the swing screaming his head off and I cannot do anything to calm him down. That has nothing to do with my thought right now, but why not share it anyway

So my Lyme doc told me that I had an enlarged spleen back in October because the Lyme had re-activated …

(Evan is now in the bath with his older brother because he was so mad at me and freaking out so much in the swing that he puked… nice. It looked like the substance of that android in Alien after he went nuts. Looks like I am going to have an extra glass of Carmenere after they go to bed tonight…)

… so over the last few months I have had increased and often intense pain right where my spleen is. I went to the ER just so that they could run all of the tests to make sure I was OK or confirm my pain was not in my head right then and there.

I was there a couple of hours. They did a CT and an X-Ray.

The verdict: No enlarged spleen or abnormalities, no fractures or sprained ribs. Take some ibuprofen and go home. You have "musculoskeletal pain". But let us know if you have trouble breathing, the pain increases with strenuous activity, or it is accompanied by light-headedness and so forth. That is like a mechanic coming out to see why my Highlander won't start on a cold morning and saying "Yep, it won't start right now. Just give 'er a jump later and she'll start up fine". Meanwhile the battery needs to be replaced.

Funny thing is that the very reason I went in is because of those last few symptoms in the first place! When the doc was giving me a physical exam of the area he touched the ribs that cover the spleen area and man did it hurt. I yelped out a "Crap!" when he poked it.

What I have learned is that doctors around here – especially those who are part of HMO's – treat the test no matter what the patient clinical diagnosis might be. If they do not see physical evidence of something present in the test, they do not treat you. So even though I yelped out in pain, since the test did not show anything, the treatment ended there. This is true of my PCP and others around here as well.

It seems like an insurance issue. If the test does not give you the physical evidence of something, it does not exist. It does not seem like the insurance providers who basically accredit the doctors and hospitals give a damn about a doctor's clinical diagnosis – if there is one at all. My Lyme doc is not part of any HMO for that reason – so he is not beholden to the "approved" treatments from the insurance providers.

So I still have intense pain in the same spot. Ibuprofen helps me ignore it. But it has been there for over a month and will continue there for much longer. But it, like the Lyme disease, apparently does not exist. This is enough to make someone go crazy and it reveals how powerful belief is over the matter of the body. If I were to continue going to that ER I would eventually probably believe that the whole reason I have felt crappy since the presentation of the EM rash is a psychological issue. Good thing I go back tot he Lyme doc in a month to help ease my anxiety and emerging belief to the contrary of my clear physical limitations these days.

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