1) went to the ER in the middle of an MS attack, told them I was having an MS attack was told I didn’t know what I was talking about, they refused to give me an mri to even entertain the option shot me up with Ativan for three days to knock me out while arguing with my mom that I was insane and needed to be treated for mental health until she got the board of directors involved and they gave me the mri which showed three huge active lesions on my brain confirming it was an MS attack... by the time I left there I couldn’t walk or talk because they delayed treatment so long. Oh and I lost my job because the doctors failed to send in my medical leave paperwork in a timely fashion.
2. Same hospital treated a newborn baby for opiate withdrawal despite their being no evidence of opiates in his mother’s system or in his meconium. (I was assigned to investigate this case a month before my MS fiasco) baby was mixed race, mom was an immigrant.
3. My neurologist “fired” me when I refused the medications for MS after researching them and reading the side effect profiles. Coupled with the fact the UK won’t give them out at all because they aren’t effective. I haven’t had an MS attack in six and a half years since making that decision and all I’ve done was eat a little healthier and change from a highly stressful field to a moderately stressful field.
4. My son had an adverse reaction to the Ritalin his school forced me to put him on, went to an emergency appointment with the psych and was told to up his dose. Despite me telling them he was predisposed to mood disorders and despite the research stating that children with mood disorders given stimulants like and including Ritalin have adverse psychotic and violent reactions and all the linkages found with misprescibed meds and school shootings. So he was pulled off everything and we never went back to that school district or that doctor group ever again.
5. Back to hospital from first examples.. a little girl that was in the kindergarten class I worked in two years ago went in two times over a weekend with excruciating stomach pains. They sent her home without testing her saying it was nothing. The third time she went in same stomach pain and by that point her appendix had burst she was in acute sepsis and she died. She was black, 5 years old.
6. Six hundred dollar bill to glance in my husbands mouth and prescribe an antibiotic for a tooth ache that we knew was infected and needed an antibiotic from the door. We were there like ten minutes total, with the nurse or whatever for two and never even saw a doctor. Urgent cares don’t deal with teeth and it’s impossible to get seen immediately by a dentist out here.
The economic shit just runs through everything.. medicine shouldn’t be a for profit industry (and that doesn’t mean medical doctors/nurses shouldnt be well compensated, they should). But it’s a system of haves vs have nots. If you have it’s top notch care and if u have not then your lucky if you get any type of care at all and it shouldn’t be like that.
I'm so sorry for what you've been through and have seen others, particularly children, go through. This is wrong.
The average person, if not an advocate for their own health care, needs to become one.
I've been put on all sorts of medications over the years, particularly when depressed, and have stopped taking things that doctors told me I should take because I know my own body and can tell when something is not right with it. Some doctors may say to increase the dosages of whatever and not give up so easily. I just don't listen to that and if I'm a rebel, so be it.
I've seen people with bipolar and depression just be drugged up zombies and be too weak to fight for their own health care. It saddens me. You have to be your own advocate because no one else will do it for you.
It bothers me that nutritional training is so weak for many in medical school. Nutritional interventions often solve a lot of problems or at least alleviate them.
It bothers me that people can get profiled, such as the obese person being treated differently. Not all obese people are lazy and I would venture to say that none of them are lazy. A friend of mine was shamed by a doctor for being pregnant and obese. Yes, it made for a high risk pregnancy, but how is it upholding the Hippocratic oath to do no harm when shaming a patient who comes to you in need? It's not.
Yet at the same time, I believe most doctors are doing the best they can in a system where pharmaceutical companies pressure them to promote drugs and more. It's the system that's more than a bit broken.
