Doctors Suck

Happened to catch this show on TV yesterday, Mystery Diagnosis, and it made me angry at doctors all over again.

Most seem totally unqualified to be doctors and not even fit to be plumbers. Plumbers are much more thorough about finding and fixing the problem.

Here's a fantastic example of how doctors FAIL, and at something so simple. So simple they should be slapped so hard in the mouth they forget they're doctors and go become janitors.

A woman in seemingly perfect health goes from a size 2 to a size 20 in a matter of a few months with most of the weight gain in her abdomen. She has numerous other symptoms I won't bother to list, but all are completely abnormal.

She sees doctor after doctor after doctor who cannot figure out what's wrong with her. For seven years this goes on as she tries everything she can think of to deal with her symptoms, hoping on every birthday and Christmas that by the next birthday or Christmas someone will help her.

Totally fed up she decides to take matters into her own hands and gets a hold of her medical records. She reads through all the tests and results to see her cortisol levels are WAY too high - ridiculously high. It was right there in her records, but NO ONE SAW IT. Or more accurately, no one bothered to read her goddamn records that were right there in her goddamn file.

She goes online and starts to research high levels of cortisol. In five minutes she diagnoses herself with Cushing's Syndrome.

Seven years. Seven years she tried to get one doctor, any doctor, to help her, and none of them could. Five minutes with her own file and she diagnosed the condition. She was a flight attendant. No medical background of any kind. Doctors - FAIL.

How hard would it have been for one doctor, in the dozens and dozens she saw, to take five minutes to read her lab tests? What colossal lame bags of shit.

So they're not all endocrine specialists - fine. But if the patients can use Google, can't the doctors? Too busy golfing and writing out useless prescriptions?

ARGH! Makes me so mad!

I have to wonder, if we're trusting these people with our lives, why don't we require all doctors to take annual refresher courses and certifying exams to remain practicing physicians? Fail the course and you're on probation until you learn it and pass the test. Can't pass it within a required timeline? You lose your license.

Even my mechanic has to take ongoing training to remain certified to work on my car, but my doctor can graduate med school, complete a residency, then not take another course or exam for 20 years and still remain qualified to do the job? Hardly.