So I went to my doctor this morning. A few years back, I had what appeared to be a single mump on the side of my face. Of course, that’s not how mumps work, and that’s not what it was. What it turned out to be was a clogged (and, subsequently, infected) salivary duct. Fine. I’m not a big fan of antibiotics, but I’m less of a fan of having a big mump on the side of my head, so I took ’em, and it went away.

About 4 days ago, I started feeling tender/sore at the back of my jaw. It felt similar to what had happened in the past, so this morning — with a holiday weekend looming — I decided to go to the doctor to get it checked out. This guy spent 3 minutes looking at me, wrote me a script for Augmentin or some such, and sent me on my way. I asked him, “why would you think this sort of thing keeps happening, assuming it is the same sort of thing as before?” His response, “well, you’d probably want to check with an ear/nose/throat doc about that.” WHAT?? Why would he treat something about which he has no knowledge?

I know why. The industry of traditional medicine in this country has become apathetic to the needs of the patient. It seems to me that most doctors are just grunting through the workday of their damned J-O-B and not really paying attention to what’s going on with patients. If he felt he couldn’t treat me, why didn’t he take my best interests at heart and simply SAY SO? After all, aren’t they supposed to be looking out for their patient’s best interest all the time? At the very least, don’t they realize they’re in the customer service business, and that mis-treating your customers will eventually leave you with NO customers?

Argh. So I have my prescription waiting for me at the pharmacy, but at this point I’m not certain if I’ll actually take the crap or not. As I said, I’m no big fan of antibiotics, and had we not had a holiday weekend around the corner, I probably would have stayed on my “wait and see” course. I have an appointment scheduled with my chiropractor on Wednesday. He actually seems to spend time *understanding* the human body, and treating based on that understanding. Perhaps I’ll be able to wait until then and have him take a look.

What a waste of thirty minutes and eighty-five bucks.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 27th, 2005 at 10:14 am and is filed under rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.