Doctors. I can't stand them.
My wife convinced me to go to the Urgent Care today because my coughing just kept getting worse. (Been getting worse for over 4 days.) I was virtually certain it's bronchitis, because I have had it multiple times over the years, so I just wanted the x-ray to confirm or deny it, get my meds to take care of it, and go.
I will say this about the medical community... I would take the word of a nurse over a doctor because they are in the thick of everything, and see so much more and are more direct and upfront. I liken the comparison of doctors and nurses to executives and actual workers... the doctors, like executives, might know more about the overall picture, but they don't actually work on the day-to-day and actually see and do all the stuff. The nurses, like the workers, are in the thick of all the real work and know by experience and observation and are far more likely to be real with you.
The nurse I saw was like this... understood what I was saying, and figured pretty much that it was bronchitis and ordered an x-ray. Easy, right?
Wrong. The doctor comes in, and tries to throw all sorts of other stuff that has nothing to do with what I said. Finally agreed that an x-ray was a good idea, and while it thankfully showed no other issues, guess what the conclusion was?
If you guessed bronchitis... ding ding ding, you're a winner.
But you know what she was trying to pull? That since my heart rate was a little higher than normal, that I was tachycardic and said I should go to the ER. And this is after I had already told her that I have always had a higher heart rate than most people (I even relayed my story of when I took the firefighters test many years ago, that they had me retest the heart part because it ran higher than normal for most people... I just naturally have a higher pulse), with my wife telling her the same thing, and with all the hard coughing I was doing, is it a surprise my pulse was a little high? This was just a ploy to get me to go to a more expensive place to charge me for a visit for a bunch of things I don't need.
(And sadly, this trick worked before... I took my wife to the same Urgent Care for something else earlier this year, and the same doctor pulls the same tachycardic stunt. She scared my wife a bit, so we ended up going to the ER right afterward... a decision that proved to be a waste of time and money because nothing else was wrong with her. And we are still paying for that ER visit.)
After a second round of checking my pulse and it being a little higher than normal, she was still insisting that I should go to the ER. Before I let her finish her analysis this time, I stopped her and told her I just want the prescriptions to take care of my bronchitis and leave. I wasn't going to an ER and take a bed away from someone else who actually needs it. And not fall for their strategy of double dipping money off of patients.
Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.
Baptist has a history of double dipping patients over the years... I guess they finally got enough people that they screwed over that it has been harder for them to double charge people for stuff. Now their new strategy is getting their doctors to slap on all sorts of non-related things so they can charge more for services that were not necessary to begin with.
Fucking greedy medical community!!!
