The abuse I experienced in my doctor’s office the other day was surpassed only by the abuse I witnessed being doled out to another patient, who had been waiting longer than my hour and a half for her appointment. Her cries of possible abandonment were met with such apathy by the staff that it started a conversation in the waiting room.
This is a doctor renowned for mixing alternative medicine with western medicine. His reputation rests on his soothing bedside manor.
I mentioned to the room at large that my record at our pediatrician in Santa Monica was forever marred, a la Elaine’s experience in Seinfeld. I complained, while my feverish daughter was kept waiting for over an hour, that the toys in the waiting room were really dirty and I offered to clean them.
I actually saw the phrase “troublemaker” written in boldface type in my daughter’s file on our next visit. Caught in the act of reading my file, the nurse snatched it from my view, and wrote in it again while glaring at me.
Relating this experience opened a floodgate of similar experiences from the five fellow patients in the waiting room, stories of otherwise assertive people cowering in doctors’ offices for fear of alienating the staff. A Sikh doctor in Beverly Hills apparently has a secret button he pushes when he finds a patient undesirable, and then a turbaned woman escorts them out. There have also been incidents of staff repeatedly canceling a patient’s appointment and rescheduling until he or she just gives up.
There are also stories of parking garage attendants in medical buildings harassing patients for full payment up front when they don’t know exactly how long their car will be parked in the lot. Or there are cases of people brought to their knees in desperation to treat an illness, of more and more forced to pay out of pocket, of those hoping for some kind of reimbursement from insurance companies, or waiting hours for doctors who routinely double-book appointments.
What on earth is going on here? Good medical care is one of the standards that separate us from third world nations. Now, even with the outrageous prices people pay out of pocket, the treatment by staff and doctors themselves seems harried and half-hearted.
