What if Google ran our healthcare system? They already know wo much about us.. what websites we are one, what we search for, what we email each other about..I’d imagine it would be really efficient, and it would still be in the private sector.

mikehudack:

zachklein:

My real problem with healthcare

Two months ago, overnight, I began to experience sharp pain along one particular rib line. I went to a general practitioner who briefly examined me, who heard me explain that I suspected I had broken a rib a year before in a snowboarding accident and this was probably a derivative injury (he had examined me back then, right after the accident, and cleared me of any injury). All I wanted was some meds to help me sleep.

He dismissed the correlation and feared there was something worse given that no recent trauma had occurred. In the following three weeks, I visited him 3 more times to be prescribed 6 blood tests for pathological diseases (cancer) although it is ‘extremely rare’ for my profile he stated. Thankfully, a batch of cookies from my mom and a week later, these tests came back negative. Subsequently, I was prescribed a chest x-ray, which showed nothing, and then an entire day at NYU hospital for a full-body bone scan, which finally revealed that I had indeed a broken rib #7. Still, it wouldn’t explain the pain as I felt it as it wasn’t a dislocated fracture.

Finally, at a loss for an explanation, the GP sends me to a pulmonary specialist. This grandfatherly man sat me down in his office to interview me for 30 minutes — the longest any physician had talked to that point, about my lifestyle, athletic interests, and previous injuries — and then takes me into an examination room to one of those old-fashioned ‘shirt off’ tests where he pounded one hand with the hammer of his other fist into several parts of my back in chest. He grunted and told me to put my shirt back on, and meet him back in the office.

I sat down and he declared without doubt, “You have Costochondritis.”

My mouth open, he reassured me, “It’s harmless. Take motrin and stop throwing your body all around. Take it easy, man.”

I went home and read from bed for hours symptoms and testimony from people who share this pain involving “the inflammation of the cartilage that attaches the ribs to the breastbone.” It seems like a fit.

So, look, I don’t know that this old man is right — there could be still be an undectected ailment affecting me — however, I generally agree with Occam’s Razor, the principle that given competing explanations, the simplest is better.

What I do know is that this scavenger hunt for an answer cost me about $500 and 20 hours of missed work, and my health insurer nearly $4,000.

But you know what the real punch line is? If you simply Google ‘pain sternum rib’, guess the first result?

Costochondritis

So, against this backdrop of a national meltdown over healthcare, I wonder how any solution could work on top of our culture of hypochondria and the bureaucratic and almost lawyerly process of diagnosis and treatment.