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Peter Letterese "We All Go to the Doctor..."

by Peter Letterese, founder Galileo® Systems International

W e all go to the Doctor. Well, at least we all have, at one time or another. Some of us far more often than we wish we had to. And we don¹t give the whole process too very much thought. Something hurts, breaks, looks bad or is oozing and we ask the Doctor to figure it out, fix it, make it go and stay away ­ hopefully forever.

When you think about it, it¹s pretty much of an extension of what happened when we were little and went to ³Mom² with whatever hurt. And yesterday¹s Doctors were a lot like our parents. My Dad sure was. He¹s 96 now ­ but his patients came to him, in those days 25 years ago, as often as he went to them (deploying that anachronistic medical protocol known as the ³house call²) and he took care of whatever ³hurt².

Today¹s visit to the Doctor isn¹t much like going to Mom or bringing one¹s ³booboo² to my dad, the Doctor. It¹s more like what it must have been like to live in an orphanage, where the dried-up, forbidding ³Nurse² grudgingly looked you over with an attitude expressing her disdain that you would bother to ³be sick or hurt² in the first place.

Well, maybe it isn¹t that bad all the time. But, considering that old-time Doctors or ³Mom² herself never made us feel guilty for coming to try to get better, it¹s that way enough to mention. Neither of them ever asked for an insurance card as the first paragraph of the conversation, did they? It isn¹t that Doctors or their staffs don¹t care ³about people², it¹s that they are paid not to, and somehow they manage to anyway.

Methods across the length and breadth of any Doctor¹s office or Emergency Room that help medical personnel step over the giant barrier placed between them and their patients should be sought and when found, treasured.