It is turning out to be a very expensive medical year.  So far, I’ve been to four different specialists, because one thing led to another.  I have learned a lot about biology on google this year.  My approach to research is not necessarily doctor approved, but I do it anyway.  I take a multi-pronged approach.  I look at the official sites like mayo clinic, I look through the pub med research papers or abstracts that I have access to, I look on the quack sites as well to see what they recommend that is free or very cheap that might work as well as their comments, and I scan through forums to see first-hand accounts of descriptions of conditions that aren’t garbled medical code-speak.

I’m a big picture kind of person.  When a problem is multi-system or multi-factorial, that’s my jam.  I’ll spend hours looking at a problem from a lot of different angles, until I reach the point where I can spend a few hours saying to myself “so that’s why” over and over again.  Condition A leads to Condition B which leads to Condition C and is complicated further by Condition D.  Only Condition B is obvious.  I’m hoping for some testing to see if Conditions A, C, and D are also real, although that isn’t strictly necessary, because the same thing used to treat Condition B is also used to treat Condition A and C.  Condition D, however, that’s another matter.

It’s annual enrollment time.  People are looking at their medical insurance options for next year, and since the new POTUS has changed a few laws, people are finding that their premiums are increasing.  I know one friend who has $6000 in premium payments, and a $7000 high deductible this year.  Next year?  More where that came from.  My family’s medical payments are not as high as that, but still aren’t nice.  Since I’m well over the deductible already, I have economic incentive to actually get this stuff checked out before the end of the calendar year.  So does everybody else, judging by the scheduling delays I’m experiencing.

This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang, but a whimper.  It is interesting to see how the older doctors cope with, or don’t cope with, technological progress in computing.  These days, most younger doctors document everything they do on the computer quickly and efficiently.  One doctor I saw used paper and pen, a tape recorder, and faxed the referral.  I liked him.  He’s sharp as a tack, and paid close attention to me instead of documentation.  When I brought in my two and a half pages of typed descriptive medical history, he appreciated it.  When it is all written down like that, you can see the patterns better than asking me question after question about everything.  Plus, I communicate better in writing than orally, probably due to Condition D and Condition A, although Condition C might have something to do with it.

As usual, I go into a doctor’s office knowing what I want out of it.  Do I want drugs?  Tests?  A better understanding?  A referral?  Then my legal training gathers the evidence and presents it in a way that hopefully gets me what I want.  Sometimes, however, the 70 year old doctor sees things that I didn’t notice.  Google research gets you a long way, but not necessarily all the way to where you need to go.  Sometimes you need an experienced outsider’s viewpoint to see more clearly.  I never would have considered Condition D on my own.  Even the best researcher needs a colleague or mentor to banter with in order to think through a problem better.  This, by the way, is why people talk to deities and spirits and ancestors in their head.  Because it works, when the culture doesn’t allow them to show weakness by admitting the problem exists in the first place.  That’s why the dominant of witchcraft is arising, why the millennials are more likely to be Animist than Christian or Atheist.  If you pay attention at the edges of conversations, you’ll notice.