Modern Medicine Nearly Killed Me

I nearly died. Making a self-diagnosis of acute appendicitis is unpretentious, especially when the patient is a family physician with more than 30 years of clinical experience. The symptoms: right lower quadrant pain, increasing in intensity over a 3-day period and associated with anorexia and chills. I arranged to undergo the appropriate tests, which corroborated my diagnosis. After calling the surgeon , I headed to the hospital for an appendectomy. Unfortunately, from the moment I arrived in the emergency room (ER) until the time I was discharged from the hospital on postoperative day 9, I became increasingly dismayed by our modern health care system. My surgical abdomen became the subject of stat entries into an electronic medical record (EMR) while the old-fashioned " H and P " were basically ignored. Had I not been a well-trained and experienced physician , I am convinced that I would have suffered a fatal postoperative event. The medical students assigned to my care would never have known that I died, unless they received a notification on their Twitter account. In the ER, the unsupervised fourth-year medical-surgical rotating medical student wheeled in a large computer and began to ask me questions related to my abdominal pain. Within 5 minutes, the student had somehow acquired all the information he needed for my admission. But wait a minute; my medical history is somewhat complex, and I was taking 11 different medications on admission , but no one asked me about that. As the student doctor was wheeling his computer back to his lounge, I reminded him that his H and P were deficient. Oh, he did listen to my bowel sounds or lack thereof through a blanket and hospital gown. He forgot to listen to my lungs and never examined my mouth, eyes, feet, or ears. He forgot to check for peritoneal signs. And he never asked about my current prescriptions and other salient aspects of my medical history. To play devil's advocate, why do an exam anyway? The CT scan of the abdomen showed evidence of acute appendicitis. Based on that alone, the confident student said he would see me in the operating room in a couple of hours. In response, I opined, " Hey, you forgot a few important aspects of your H and P. " Shocked, the unsu-pervised student replied, " What do you mean? You have appendicitis. The CT scan confirms your diagnosis. …