I've been to the emergency room a couple times for various stitches and a fresh tetanus booster, but it's been a while since I went to a regular doctor. It's not that I'm afraid to go, it's that every time I go I feel like I'm at one of those time share conventions where they lock you in a little room for hours and you can't escape. At the end of the high pressure sales pitch, they charge you fifty bucks for a crappy dinner, hand you a sack full of brochures, and boot you out the door.
Inevitably, I have an appointment time for a physical, but I'm forced to sit in the waiting room with a bunch of sick people for an hour past my appointment time before they lock me in the little room. The whole time I'm in there, I'm thinking how great it would be if I were in a trade where you can create your own repeat business just by huddling all of your customers in a waiting room to infect one another. If the cell phone companies catch on to this, they'll make you pay your bill using your cell phone, and then put you on hold for a couple hours while you waited for some guy in India to take your credit card information, then charge you for the minutes you used trying to pay for the minutes you used last time. We Americans are just about dumb enough to fall for it too...
Really though, that wasn't the point I was trying to get to. If you go to the doctor for a sore back, he's probably going to take your blood pressure, look in your ears, down your throat, tap on your knees a little, and who knows what other kind of quackery, until he sees you're sufficiently worried enough about your wellbeing. Then the good doctor will tell you your blood pressure is a little high. Well no shit Sherlock, you needed a $500 machine to figure that out. I thought maybe when you looked in my ears you would have noticed the steam billowing out from spending the last two hours waiting on you to come in here. Where did you say you went to school?
OH, and then he doesn't know why you woke up one day and couldn't walk, but he's willing to prescribe you some pain pills so you won't notice that after 10 years going to school, he's still “practicing”. The same thing would happen if you came in with the a cold. Here's some antibiotics. Feeling down? Here's some UP pills. Feeling up? Here's some down pills. I still cant' figure out why it takes so long to be a doctor anyway? Is there a maximum passing golf score or something?
The point I'm trying to make is, do doctors ever fix the problem, or do they just pass out pills to cover up symptoms? If you take your car to the mechanic complaining of a funny noise, would you pay him if he handed you some earplugs? Hell no. Don't get me wrong, if I get shot or some oriental lady drives her car through my living room while I'm watching TV because she can't see over the steering wheel, by all means ship me to a hospital. Most of the time though your general practitioner is nothing more than a government sponsored drug dealer. The IRS gets their cut and they keep the masses from feeling. The health insurance industry shakes down our employers, adding to the cost of the goods we buy, but who cares as long as you can still get a script for E.D. through Al Gore's Internet?
Speaking of politicians, does anyone else find it ironic that the politicians who tell us abortion should be legal because women have the right to decide what happens to their bodies, are the same politicians who have made prostitution illegal. So much for women's rights huh??
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