Opus 2024-393: Lasts: No Longer a Preppie

I am reaching the point in life where more and more often I am being told that this may be the last time.  It started a couple years ago when I had a doctor tell me that I didn’t need to get the A1c test anymore.  Then I had one tell me that the test of my prostate wasn’t necessary anymore.  Recently, I’ve had family members telling me that I don’t need to keep going in for colonoscopies.  They say that the danger is more real than the reward.  I guess I need to get ready to die.  Fortunately, I am.

It amazes me that all these people seem to know how long I’m going to live.  With the new standards of medicine doctors don’t do half the things they used to do.  They used to palpitate your abdomen, look down your throat, check your reflexes, listen to your heart actually using the stethoscope, have a human check your blood pressure, and if my memory worked better, I could come up with many other things that doctors used to do as standard procedure.  Now they look at their computer screen and probably have the computer highlight the places where the numbers are a bit out of sync and tell me how I’m doing.

I don’t know if you ever got the print-out from your blood work.  It’s pretty self-explanatory, except for some of the jargon that you might not understand.  That could be remedied simply by changing big words to simple words.  For instance one area of reports have to do with your kidney functions.  They could say that instead of using words like renal.  They could say things like bad cholesterol and good cholesterol instead of cute little acronyms like LDL and HDL.  If you look down the columns, you’ll see the numbers that the test gives for each category and somewhere along each line will tell you what is considered the normal range for healthy human beings.  It doesn’t take a medical degree to look at these things.  I don’t need a doctor to tell me if my bad cholesterol is too high.  So why am I sitting in this office?  Maybe because I can’t get the blood work done if an all wise doctor does not send the orders.

Do I have a point or am I just being a grouchy old man? Of course it could be that I am a grouchy old man who has a point.

homo unius libri