Quote:
Originally posted by Anne Elk
My grandfather was a doctor and I was brought up with the don't-call/go-unless-you-are-on-death's-door-or-you-are-deformed metality. I do go once a year for the annual check up and need to go back to the allergist for testing and shot therapy (again). I don't think I've ever gone to the doctor due to illness. My trips have been the result of sports injuries and allergic reactions.
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I'm generally in this camp - unless it is superficially obvious that I need medical attention, I don't need medical attention. OB/GYN every 6 months (doc won't renew a scrip for a full year, go figure), and other than that, I'll only go if (i) I've suffered chronic pain for at least one week that is sufficiently bad that I can't work, eat, sleep or watch TV, (ii) I've suffered lesser chronic pain for at least a month, or (iii) something catastrophic happens and I'm in excruciating pain and/or clearly physically incapacitated (in which case I get myself carried to the ER).
Actually, the last time I went to the doc, I did something weird and horrible to my neck. (Like, I reached forward to pick up a pencil off the desk and something horrible happened to my neck.) I couldn't move. At all. Couldn't lie down, stand, sit, walk, nothing, without shrieking pain through my whole left side. The stupidity of my condition pissed me off so much (this from picking up a pencil???) that it took the Mr. 4 1/2 hours to convince me to go to the dr. (Where my resistance was justified by my having an "adverse reaction" to the synthetic opiate she shot me up with.) Anyhow, they acknowledged that they could do nothing for me, and I should just "work the kinks out," with the aid of some really, really fun drugs. Come to think of it, I should go to the Dr. more often - they pass out the recreational drugs like candy these days. Hydrocodone and a gut full of muscle relaxants - now THAT is the way to take a 3 hour conference call.
On the Dr. thing, though, I think that all the hypochondriacs who go to the Dr. to get antibiotics for colds, influenza and sprains should be removed from society and confined in the old TB wards, where their self-created flesh-eating antibiotic-resistant-germs can't infect and murder the rest of us.
