Guinea Pigs Unite

With Duke University Medical Center practically in our backyards, my neighbors and I don’t have far to go for the latest and greatest in medical technology. Indeed, it often is great, and my family has benefited from the expertise concentrated in just a few square miles of white coats and hospital scrubs.

But there’s a downside, and it’s one that gets played out all over the country. With more and more medical tools (I almost wrote “toys”) available to our physicians, we are referred more and more often for expensive, unnecessary tests.

At my annual check-up last year, I mentioned two unrelated symptoms to my doctor—poor circulation from Reynaud’s syndrome and tingling in my leg from a tight cast. Before I knew it, she had linked the two together and had written up orders for two neurological studies, which ended up costing me over $250.

I realized later that she had played successfully on my fear of an old cancer. “With your health history,” she said, “we can never be too careful.” Never mind that these symptoms were readily explained and hardly indicative of cancer.

Even later I realized that she had earned extra money for referring me to specialized procedures. Money in her pocket, money out of mine.

I was duped again recently by my daughter’s pediatrician who, at an annual exam, noticed a tiny fraction of an inch where my daughter’s spine seemed off. Immediately she ordered an x-ray. “We better get a baseline,” she said. The x-ray showed nothing but a normal spine. Cost to us? One hundred dollars.

We are expensive guinea pigs in the hands of our doctors. They are free to pursue any line of medical inquiry that they can justify. They can play on our fears as patients and our fears as parents.

As long as money continues to play such a huge role in how we are doctored, we will continue to lose out. We will pay more money for less quality, even here, in the City of Medicine.