Bad medicine

I think doctors can work miracles; we’ve all seen it done. But I’m also a huge skeptic — I think there are a large number of them who are clueless or sloppy or both.

For example, my wife’s physicians in Cincinnati — Drs. William Buckley and Dennis Reed — would have, we are sure, killed our unborn son if we had stayed there. I can’t blame them for their office refusing her treatment on at least one occasion, but I can blame them for ignoring her incredibly high blood pressure despite her repeated pleas for better treatment. (With BP of something like 140/120, they told her to lay on her left side. Period.)

They treated her like she was just a whiny patient, rather than someone who knew what was going on. When we moved to Columbus, her new doctor was shocked — he admitted her to the hospital immediately and began to actually treat her hypertension.

(Our son was born growth restricted and premature — but alive and well. Our doctor there was Dr. Samuels; our son’s name is Sam.)

Mercy Hospital in Cinci was another font of medical messups. They gave Karen the wrong indicator drug for a test, making it useless, and they gave her an overdose of meds. Luckily she knew what she was supposed to take and pointed it out to the nurse rather than popping the pills. I gotta wonder how many people don’t know and simply take what’s handed them.

We filed the legal paperwork to reserve our son the right to sue them.

So I’m not one of those folks who believes doctors know what they’re doing. I think anyone who doesn’t do their own research and know about the drugs they’re taking is asking for trouble.

So it was without surprise that I read a story on the Google blog about someone confronting some clueless doctors. “Google literally saved our newborn son from having to endure an extremely dangerous, and totally unnecessary, blood transfusion,” wrote the father.

Be careful out there.

Note: First names of doctors added 10/20, once I confirmed them.