Patients who feel that they received treatment to which they didn’t consent may feel betrayed by their providers and distrustful of the medical system. This does patients and providers a disservice, and it undermines the patient’s dominion over his/her body. “Patient autonomy” isn’t a buzzword; it’s a mandate.
To manage an influx of patients and escalating costs, some providers now offer shared appointments, wherein they see a group of patients with similar symptoms simultaneously. In fact, as of 2010, 13% of family physicians offered these appointments.
More times than I can count, I’ve been asked: “How long did it take for you to start feeling better?” I met Sandy, my physical therapist, when I was wheelchair-bound and in constant, horrific pain. So, I’m sharing this journal entry, written 15 days after meeting Sandy.
And to answer the question: It took less than 15 days.
My occupation was as a professional patient.
It’s like having two full-time jobs and never being done with work. It’s exhausting, time consuming, requires top-notch communication skills, and is a challenge each day. You get no days off. You have no coworkers. You get no compensation. Basically, it’s crap.
The provider-patient dynamic has long been plagued by paternalistic decision-making, timid patients, and communication failures. I believe that the system is the problem, not thepeople who comprise it. And the system is inextricably linked to the insurance companies, the business of hospital management, and the exhausting balancing of practice profits against patient savings.
He brilliantly describes how the medical ethicists linger in the halls of Congress, between testifying at hearings and presenting at conferences. They “serve medicine and ethics, but not patients.” His descriptions conjure up a behind-the-scenes mastermind to me – the fictional “reasonable man” about whom I learned in law school, or an Aristotelian good man. This man – The Ethicist – has divorced ethical decisions from patient care in a decisively clean way.
We talked about how it could be an Olympic sport with the way I approached it — endurance trials, training, and support from a PT. We imagined that I’d receive some sort of gold-gilded trophy with a woman standing triumphantly in her underwear. I’d successfully mastered several dynamic challenges.
Erin recently sat down with Karen Litzy, a physical therapist in NYC and the host of the Healthy Wealthy & Smart podcast, for a candid conversation about what it’s like to live in chronic pain.
