In today’s medicine the leitmotiv is “prevention”.
The term is much bandied about in health care organizations and officials are keen on scrutinizing every part of your body as often as possible.
In order to prevent or at least stave off diseases, your health care provider wants you to go through (and charge you for it of course) a series of regular medical exams.
Some exams are benign but some can be invasive and rather uncomfortable.
Many lab technicians by the way seem to be cold-blooded creatures lacking compassion and sensitivity.
They don’t seem to be aware (or care much) about your discomfort and will sometimes repeat the same procedure a few times to “make sure” that they didn’t miss anything.
To me, those soulless people are strangely akin to bounty hunters. They seem to be bent on finding something wrong within your body and I sometimes wonder if they are not rewarded for coming up with something necessitating a (costly) medical procedure.
Since five years ago an unnecessary medical procedure left me incapacitated for about 3 months, I have become quite leery of hospitals and their procedures.
Those procedures sometimes weirdly remind of Josef Mengele and his ilk.
Mengele (the Angel of Death) was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.
He was infamous for performing cruel, grotesque and painful medical experiments on camp inmates, including children. When he was done with them, and if they survived, he callously sent them to the gas chambers.
My doctor wants me to have a yearly eye exam to make sure that nothing is going wrong with my sight. I am not against it, but I wish that this procedure was streamlined and more efficiently performed.
During my last exam, I went through 3 different technicians who submitted me to various forms of torture.
My eyes were repeatedly submitted to blinding flashes of light that left me half blind for about half an hour.
And they kept repeating this uncomfortable procedure until I finally balked.
But it is for your own good they said.
I don’t care. If procedure there must be, it should be done properly the first time and patients should not be “mengelized” at will.
Lab technicians seem to have a tendency to treat patients like guinea pigs who have to submit unquestioningly to all their whims.
Not so I say. A patient has the right and duty to object to any lengthy uncomfortable procedure.
Most patients are too timid to do so, but they ought to.
You are the master of your own domain and you should not let anybody mistreat you.
If you get uncomfortable with a procedure, say so. Loudly!
We are after all paying all those people’s salaries and they should not forget it!
Alain
[contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]