A recent blood-spattered stubbed toe, a ruined sandal and a friend’s concern made me question whether a visit to the doctor was in order. Would I really schedule an appointment with a doctor (and take up a timeslot that could have been filled with another patient) over something as minor as a scrape?
Unfortunately, this has become the view in American society — it could be a broken toe. It could be infected. It could also be nothing — better safe than sorry, they say. What happens when your “safe” causes another person to be “sorry?” Health anxiety and hypochondria are driving factors in going to the doctor’s office. However, is this being preemptive? Or is it counterproductive to medicine as a whole?
Being anxious about one’s own health does have its benefits. Catching a mole that looks erroneous in nature and having it removed early is a preventative measure usually advised by doctors. It is not advised that you wait until something turns cancerous before you do something about it.
This is why screening is so commonplace — Papanicolaou tests, electrocardiograms, prostate exams, colonoscopies and so on. Simply put, getting screened is a smart move. Trying to fix health conditions after they have developed can be very time consuming and expensive, and no one enjoys wasting time or money.
People are indeed allowed to worry about their own health problems; they can do whatever they want with their lives. However, when one person’s health anxiety interferes with another person’s health, is that truly alright?
A personal example comes from my grandfather’s medical drama last summer. He noticed an irregular mole on his foot. After taking a month to reach a dermatologist who diagnosed it as malignant melanoma, it then took another two months until my grandfather had surgery. Throughout the entire waiting period (one month of waiting for an appointment, two months of waiting until surgery) my medical knowledge made me very distressed. I knew that if the cancer had spread into his bloodstream, it was all over; the cancerous cells could metastasize to every part of his body. Was everyone who was going in before my grandfather suffering from something as serious as a melanoma?
Probably not. Mostly, it was ordinary, healthy people going in and being preemptive. But what about my grandfather? Age discrimination aside (that’s a whole other topic), why was there a delay in surgery, given the seriousness of cancer? I’m unsure if my grandfather really had to wait in line behind people simply because he didn’t schedule an appointment in time.
Given situations like these, perhaps a bit of the human soul should come into play in medicine. If you’re working an emergency room and you have three people waiting to be fixed up for their breaks and ankle sprains, and someone rushes in dying and bleeding, are they told to wait in line? Probably not, because there is triage, which places priority based on the severity of a condition.
The situation becomes sticky when people try to define what an “emergency” is. It can range from a baby sniffling to a gunshot wound. Can a systematic way to define an emergency exist? Ultimately, there comes a point when preemption cannot be justified, because it reaches a certain point where it can actually harm another’s health. My grandfather was lucky enough that his cancer had not reached his bloodstream by the time he got to the surgery. Not everyone is lucky.
A version of this article appeared in the Apr 20 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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Hospitals and doctors' offices triage patients to determine emergencies. In addition, cancers and other diseases are ranked (stage I, etc.) to determine how immediate treatment needs to be.
The health care crisis in the U.S. is exacerbated by people who don't seek preventative care. Treating someone with melanoma is considerably more expensive than yearly mole checks, etc.
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The health care crisis is mainly caused by idiots without insurance going to the emergency room for minor things like a stubbed toe. They aren't idiots for being without insurance, necessarily, but going to the doctor for a stubbed toe or a cough during winter is just stupid and wasteful. Fix that and then you get rid of most of the problems related to lines and high costs.
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Like the first commenter said, your grandfather's doctor's office should have prioritized his case over other patients with less urgent concerns. If it took him a month to get in for a consultation, it might be because they had a flux of other cases that were more serious. I really doubt that they were seeing benign cases before your grandfather's.
Action is certainly better than inaction. Think of Natasha Richardson's recent death. She brushed off her "bump on the head," and the results were fatal. Had she gotten it checked out, it could have saved her life.
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