Disastrous Medical Doctors-Top TenList of Apnea Ignorances

[DavidCarolina]

Im compiling a list of things "traditional" M.D.'s do to harm your health in general, and prevent accurate apnea
diagnoses in particular:

1. When they hear "cant breath", "tired", and "agitated"....they automatically think of heart or thyroid problems. In other words, the most expensive, time consuming, traditional, and predictable "instant solutions" to your symptom list.

2. They treat your "test results". Not your actual symptoms.

3. They want you out of their office within 3 minutes so they can bilk the insurance company.

4. They do absolutely no research on your specific problem. They're much too "god-like" to actually THINK through a problem, and RESEARCH it.......by the way, this is a direct violation of the hypocratic oath they took which is in reality
an issue of malpractice.

5. They get you into the "specialist" and "pharmaceutical" loops as quickly as possible rather than actually SOLVING YOUR UNDERLYING PROBLEM

6. For all their education, very few of them can actually think outside the box. Their intelligence is not really that substantial, and it is certainly not creative. They are narrowly intelligent in a small window.

7. "GOOGLE" is their biggest enemy for the reason that we can uncover myriads of information about OUR PROBLEMS on our OWN now. They're threatened by your research my friend.

8. They secretly dont really want you better, so much as they want you on a dependent cycle upon them and the drugs they make money off of.

9. They dont LISTEN to you, and if you have an unusual problem they PATRONIZE your intelligence. This is a crude form of peer pressure akin to "Lord of the Flies".

10. They steer you immediately in the wrong direction, into a time consuming loop of wasted time.....into an area of specialty (frequently that you have "thyroid problems") that takes months to get treated for........for which many of us need no treatment. Granted, some of us have thyroid problems, but the failure to order a sleep study on a slightly overweight middle aged person complaining of respiratory and agitation/fatigue problems borders on the criminally negligent.

[LSAT]

When I complained of excessive snoring and waking often during the night my GP sent me to a sleep doctor who set up a sleep test. You have the wrong doctors. Don't put all doctors in the same category as yours.

[TalonNYC]

I agree with both previous posters.

Many doctors do not act as partners in health care with their patients. I have experienced this personally, and ditch those docs. The doctors I keep are true partners in this whole process. I research opinions and bring those opinions to the table, for the doctor - who has better training and access to more research - to take into consideration. On the other side of the equation, I take the doctor's advice with much more weight than basic research I do on my own, but don't take it as the ONLY opinion.

It took 2 or 3 doctors for me to find the one I'm comfortable with. She listens to my opinions and does take them into consideration before she makes her diagnosis. On more than one occasion she's changed her opinion based on mine. On far more occasions she's changed MY mind, so it does go both ways.

The first few doctors I tried were of the other form. "This is what you have, this is what you'll do, now go home" doesn't work for me. Neither does "here's an antibiotic that won't help you, but will make everyone's life worse later on." I get bronchitis easily, I know when I'm getting it after a bad cold. These other doctors would send me home to "get better in time" and see me again in 3 or 4 days when I was in much worse shape.

My current doctor will prescribe the medication but tell me not to fill the Rx unless things get worse. This is because she knows I'm responsible enough not to fill the thing if I get better without it. She also knows that I've had bronchitis on more than one occasion, and know the difference between that and a bad chest cold. She's also told me to go home and rest without the Rx, because I wasn't going to get bronchitis this time - and because she was honest and open to listening to me, I trusted her. She's been right *nearly* every time LOL.

Do not give up, do not give in, but always remember that we're paying these people because they have better training than we do. If they refuse to be a partner in your health care, dump them! If they *are* being an active partner, and their opinion is different from yours, trust their opinion.

[BillH]

There are exceptions to this. I was talking to my doctor about my general sleep issues. He took quite some time looking at my history, spent some time revieing my medication history. He then turned to me and said "You need a sleep study" I was astounded.

[DennisG]

I guess I have been lucky, my Primary Care Physician for the past 15 years has been thorough and knowledgeable in all of the issues I have brought to his attention. When I finally listened to my wife and talked to him about my snoring, he asked me the standard list of questions from the Epworth Sleepiness Scale. Based on my responses, he referred me to a Sleep Doctor for a sleep study. My wife has not been as lucky with her primary care doctors and after 15 years has recently started seeing my doctor.

Now the Sleep Doctors I have seen are another story. Doc #1 was impossible to get an appointment with, did not spend any time with me when I did get to see him and did not have any helpful advise on adjusting to CPAP, he just prescribed sleeping pills for me and told me I would get used to it. Doc #2 is still new, since January this year, so the jury is still out on him. At my last appointment, we discussed how my treatment was going and he decided to make some adjustments to my pressures, but I got the feeling that he did not like the fact that I knew as much as I did (stuff I learned here). He put the new prescription on my card and also turned off the displays on my machine of AHI, 90% pressure, etc. Kinda strange...

Dennis

[avi123]

Im compiling a list of things "traditional" M.D.'s do to harm your health in general, and prevent accurate apnea
diagnoses in particular:

1. When they hear "cant breath", "tired", and "agitated"....they automatically think of heart or thyroid problems. In other words, the most expensive, time consuming, traditional, and predictable "instant solutions" to your symptom list.

2. They treat your "test results". Not your actual symptoms.

3. They want you out of their office within 3 minutes so they can bilk the insurance company.

4. They do absolutely no research on your specific problem. They're much too "god-like" to actually THINK through a problem, and RESEARCH it.......by the way, this is a direct violation of the hypocratic oath they took which is in reality
an issue of malpractice.

5. They get you into the "specialist" and "pharmaceutical" loops as quickly as possible rather than actually SOLVING YOUR UNDERLYING PROBLEM

6. For all their education, very few of them can actually think outside the box. Their intelligence is not really that substantial, and it is certainly not creative. They are narrowly intelligent in a small window.

7. "GOOGLE" is their biggest enemy for the reason that we can uncover myriads of information about OUR PROBLEMS on our OWN now. They're threatened by your research my friend.

8. They secretly dont really want you better, so much as they want you on a dependent cycle upon them and the drugs they make money off of.

9. They dont LISTEN to you, and if you have an unusual problem they PATRONIZE your intelligence. This is a crude form of peer pressure akin to "Lord of the Flies".

10. They steer you immediately in the wrong direction, into a time consuming loop of wasted time.....into an area of specialty (frequently that you have "thyroid problems") that takes months to get treated for........for which many of us need no treatment. Granted, some of us have thyroid problems, but the failure to order a sleep study on a slightly overweight middle aged person complaining of respiratory and agitation/fatigue problems borders on the criminally negligent.

Reply:

David, IMO, what you wrote is mostly sheer nonsense. One thing it sure does: frighten newly OSA sufferers who post here.

[DavidCarolina]

Read this book as soon as possible: "Surviving Your Doctors", "Why the Medical System is Dangerous to Your Health and How to Get through it Alive". You can get it anywhere or on amazon.

Sorry to scare anybody. The list I compiled was my personal experience with my doctors. Im glad and thankful
if your experience was different. I have a special empathy for people who have struggled for years to get help.

I should also make it clear that I personally spent 3 WEEKS at the MAYO CLINIC, and was sent from specialist to
specialist and nobody other than the eventual ENT steered me toward sleep. And even then, I INSISTED that they
give me cpap.

Obviously, not EVERY doctor is this way. There are millions of good ones. But the medical system is being
so corrupt.

And let me ask you a question: how much time does YOUR doctor spend researching YOUR problems that they cant immediately diagnose? The answer is almost universally ZERO.

And as far as scaring people, having this information that they need sleep study immediately will HELP them, and not
harm them. You dont need a GP to recommend sleep study.

I was only trying to connect with other people who have experienced the utter frustration of losing thousands of dollars and hours trying to get diagnosed by incompetent and ignorant physicians.

This forum is wonderful, but sometimes we're confronted with ugly truths and real experiences. I hope some of my comments and observations lead new people in the direction of avoiding ignorant physicians who are incompetent.

[taberge]

At my last appointment, we discussed how my treatment was going and he decided to make some adjustments to my pressures, but I got the feeling that he did not like the fact that I knew as much as I did (stuff I learned here). He put the new prescription on my card and also turned off the displays on my machine of AHI, 90% pressure, etc. Kinda strange...

Dennis

I would call the office back and tell them the machine is malfunctioning, that you can no longer see that information. If they then tell you that it was done intentionally, that is a big red flag to find another doctor. Like any other test run on you, you have the right to that information whether the doctor likes it or not.

Personally I would find the manual online and turn the info back on myself.

[jnk]

. . . Obviously, not EVERY doctor is this way. There are millions of good ones. . . .

Thanks for posting that statement, DavidCarolina.

I think docs are mostly trained to prescribe drugs and surgeries to help awake people, not to point people toward breathing machines that treat the sleeping. It is difficult for them to know things they aren't taught. Their job is to think inside the box. Google contains a lot of links to harmful information right alongside the helpful information.

Even good docs have limitations. So the fact of the matter is that much more of the responsibility for good health ends up resting on us patients, these days.

I understand that being a doc is no picnic, and that because of legal and insurance and other complications of medical practice in modern times, a lot of the more recent talented graduates have little desire to be traditional docs. Who can blame them?

My PCP could have sent me for a sleep test earlier, but I am grateful he eventually did. My sleep doc wrote me an Rx and offered to customize it to help me deal with my DME to settle an argument I had with them on mask choice. That's about all I can ask of him. He spoke truth to me about my options and likely outcomes. I give him credit for that. But I have no desire to see him again unless I run into a problem I need his help with.

Sorry you've had a rough time of it, DavidCarolina. May you have more contact with medical people you can respect and relate with.

[avi123]

And let me ask you a question: how much time does YOUR doctor spend researching YOUR problems that they cant immediately diagnose? The answer is almost universally ZERO.

Reply:

In my case my regular Internist has not diagnosed my OSA. So I went to another Internist who did suspect it and who sent me to a Sleep Study. But my regular internist did save my life 8 years years ago by diagnosing my Staph infection and put me immediately on Antibiotics even before waiting for the culture test.

IMO, U. S. physicians are super. Let me ask you this about Mayo Clinic which you've belittled: why King Husein of Jordan chose Mayo for therapy?

[DavidCarolina]

Im not running down US doctors in cases when they excel WITHIN THEIR SPECIALITIES. As some people have said,
an internist can find staph, a cardiologist can find arrythmia, an endocronologist can find hypothyroidism.

The problem is that a physician, to make significant money, can only allot so much time to any one patient IN GENERAL. There are exceptions.

In my case, I went in complaining of Dyspnea, Agitation, Nausea, and Extreme Fatigue. I went from walking nearly 5 miles a day to zero overnight. Those are a very specific set of paramaters for a 50 year old male with a deviated septum, good blood work, good initial heart indications, blood gasses, and nearly 100 percent oxygenation.

And what were the "probable or possible" diagnoses???? From MULTIPLE doctors??????

-anxiety
- heart blockage
-thyroid
-possible multiple sclerosis

Not ONE doctor, and i mean NOT ONE, suggested sleep study. Every one that I asked said it was NOT POSSIBLE that sleep apnea could cause the type of problems I had--especially during the day.

Not ONE did any extra research. And Im talking GOOGLING "shortness of breath" and what can cause it.

In short, I became my own doctor, doing research, ordering tests which had not been ordered (for vitamin deficiencies, infectious diseases like tick bites, etc).

I also began exploring holistic explanations (as ive explained here before, I also suffer from intestinal permeability which causes auto immune problems and food allergies, which if you've done any research can "mimic an disease in the human body") The reaction by Medical Doctors to all this was a bemused exasperation, and finally the old "You need to see a psychiatrist" bait and switch.

And still, I repeat, not one of them did any extra RESEARCH, which on google, would have popped up SLEEP APNEA and FOOD ALLERGIES within the top ten list of causing my symptoms.

Why I didnt start all this reasearch before? Because I trusted Doctors to be exhaustive and thorough. It turns out, the majority of ones I stumbled across basically "Guessed" at my condition simply based upon random hunches based on their own personal experience.

This is called a "non scientific" procedure, and it constitutes malpractice.

[avi123]

In my case, I went in complaining of Dyspnea, Agitation, Nausea, and Extreme Fatigue. I went from walking nearly 5 miles a day to zero overnight. Those are a very specific set of parameters for a 50 year old male with a deviated septum, good blood work, good initial heart indications, blood gasses, and nearly 100 percent oxygenation.

And what were the "probable or possible" diagnoses???? From MULTIPLE doctors??????

-anxiety
- heart blockage
-thyroid
-possible multiple sclerosis

Not ONE doctor, and i mean NOT ONE, suggested sleep study. Every one that I asked said it was NOT POSSIBLE that sleep apnea could cause the type of problems I had--especially during the day.

Not ONE did any extra research. And Im talking GOOGLING "shortness of breath" and what can cause it.

In short, I became my own doctor, doing research, ordering tests which had not been ordered (for vitamin deficiencies, infectious diseases like tick bites, etc).

I also began exploring holistic explanations (as ive explained here before, I also suffer from intestinal permeability which causes auto immune problems and food allergies, which if you've done any research can "mimic an disease in the human body") The reaction by Medical Doctors to all this was a bemused exasperation, and finally the old "You need to see a psychiatrist" bait and switch.

And still, I repeat, not one of them did any extra RESEARCH, which on google, would have popped up SLEEP APNEA and FOOD ALLERGIES within the top ten list of causing my symptoms.

Why I didnt start all this reasearch before? Because I trusted Doctors to be exhaustive and thorough. It turns out, the majority of ones I stumbled across basically "Guessed" at my condition simply based upon random hunches based on their own personal experience.

This is called a "non scientific" procedure, and it constitutes malpractice.[/quote]

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I sort of agree with you on: Patient heal thyself!

That's why I went back to school to get M.Sc. in Biomedical Eng.

I also believe in: investor teach yourself about investing. Oops, my wife told me that I tend to be gullible.

But, I don't blame any one!

If a Doc did not agree with your idea on a CPAP why didn't you go to another Doc?

This story reminds me, sort of, about Michael Jackson who demanded drugs until he found a Doc who gave it to him.