David B. Schafer - March 17, 2018
Throughout my lifetime I have needed so many doctor’s visits and different kinds of medical consultations. Dating back to when I was just a year old I needed four different ear surgeries involving tubes. When I was in first grade I was seen by mental health professionals to treat the various mental illnesses I had been diagnosed with, when I was in fourth grade I was bitten by a black widow spider and needed emergency venom extraction in the doctor’s office and in fifth grade I was given psychotherapy services in hopes of assisting in the treatment process of my various mental conditions. It wasn’t until after I graduated High School when I really saw exactly how horrific our Healthcare System is.
After High School, once I started college, I realized that my struggles had only just begun. I had difficulty with dealing with some of my academic and personal struggles in a healthy manner. As a result, I had been seeing a Psychiatrist every few months. I found seemed to be a fine Psychiatrist. I was often pleased with her care.
One day after I had just gotten home from school I saw a letter from Psychcare, the company the psychiatrist I was seeing practiced at. Although I truly had nothing to be afraid of I still became worried. My first thought was that I had an outstanding balance that I didn’t know about or that they might be sending me to the hospital again by mistake. The fear and worry I had soon turned into pure rage and disappointment. The letter had said that my doctor was now refusing to see me. It said that I had missed several appointment dates and that there were multiple attempts to contact me but I never responded. Knowing very well that I did not receive any phone call, email, or text message regarding this I called the office of the doctor who I had been seeing and told them the truth of how I never received any phone calls, emails, or texts regarding my “missed appointments”. They told me that they remembered calling me multiple times and I never answered. I then asked them to read me the phone number they had been dialing to call me just to rule out them using the wrong phone number and sure enough one of the receptionists mixed two numbers incorrectly which explains all the confusion.
Once we had discovered that it was the receptionist's mistake I asked the receptionists if I could resume treatment with my psychiatrist. The receptionist didn’t even bother to ask the doctor my question, they just told me that she still refused to see me followed by them hanging up on me. After that infuriating conversation, they stopped taking my calls, stopped all medication prescriptions, and stopped any and all treatments in their tracks.
A couple of weeks later I ran out of my last prescription of anti-anxiety medications and started experiencing intense symptoms of withdrawal. The symptoms included dizziness, cognitive dissonance, fatigue, heightened anxiety, a dramatic increase in panic attacks, and increase in mild psychotic episodes. After a couple of weeks of experiencing these symptoms and at this severity I finally went to the emergency room to seek help. After roughly an hour of waiting the nurse practitioner said that abruptly not taking stopping the medications I was on was dangerous and could cause seizures. Soon after they said this, sure enough, I started showing pre-seizure symptoms and they put me in a bed immediately. As if this whole situation wasn’t already bad enough already, I did indeed end up having a seizure.They also had to put in a central line in order to be able to get anti-seizure medications into my bloodstream to stop a seizure from causing permanent brain damage.
In the end, weeks and many sleepless nights later, I was finally able to recover from withdrawals. I ended up contacting the California Board Of Neurology and reported the doctor for actively committing medical negligence and malpractice. A couple of weeks later I received a letter in the mail basically stating that she and the practice she was running underwent thorough analysis and evidence of malpractice and that her medical license was now under investigation.
In conclusion, the injustice in modern American healthcare is much more widespread than people might think and much worse than people realize. I strongly believe that if more medical professionals worked together and fixed their professional flaws American healthcare and even national healthcare for that matter can improve exponentially and more people can live a full and happy life. Doctors are required to take an oath after they have completed medical school. This is called the Hippocratic Oath. In the oath, it says “ I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures”. My doctor broke this Hippocratic Oath the second she decided that I wasn’t worth the so-called “trouble”. She should have given me the benefit of the doubt and showed compassion for me. After all, I was her patient and isn't one of the most prominent components of being a doctor showing empathy and looking to improve the lives of others under any circumstances.
In the end, this will affect me not only as a person but as a doctor as well. It’s lessons like these that have taught me and will continue to teach me how not to treat people, let alone patients. It’s things like this that will always remind me to stop and think whether this is really the best course of treatment for my patients, my friends, and even myself. As long as people continue to make mistakes like this I will continue to be reminded what is right and what is wrong.
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