Miracle Cures

As a hotel doctor, I save lives – almost always by calling paramedics or sending guests to an emergency room.

Now and then I cure someone by removing a sliver, ear wax, or a foreign body from an eye. Patients are grateful; it’s a thrill for me, too.

When laymen think of saving lives, they may picture a doctor handing out a prescription, but this is rare. Antibiotics are genuine miracle cures for infections such meningitis, endocarditis, severe cellulitis and other infections that require hospitalization.

When doctors prescribe an antibiotic in the office, it’s mostly as a placebo but even when used properly for infections we encounter (urine, skin, throat) these would usually resolve without treatment.

Cures are a surgeon’s specialty. If a part of your body is diseased, and the surgeon cuts it out, you’re cured.

Hotel Visits I Don't Make

I don’t make housecalls for certain symptoms: shortness of breath, chest pain, loss of consciousness, and severe abdominal pain.

Treating asthma, the leading cause of breathlessness in the young, takes hours. Giving a shot and then leaving before the guest improves is risky.

Breathless in older people usually means heart or lung disease. No doctor in his right mind treats this with a prescription, but possessing a mind is not a legal requirement for practicing medicine.

No one ignores an elderly person who faints, but this doesn’t happen often. The young seem to faint regularly. They collapse, wake up, and call me, frightened. I’m happy to make a housecall, check blood pressure, do an exam, and ask questions. By this time he or she has recovered, and I’ve never discovered something alarming in otherwise healthy young people. “Everyone is entitled to one faint,” a wise old doctor told me. If it keeps happening, a doctor should investigate.

Chest pain is a serious sign, but serious chest pain is not subtle. Niggling discomfort does not qualify. Textbooks warn that heart attacks can occur with no symptoms although these are usually in people with other problems, especially diabetes. Since a doctor cannot diagnose a heart attack by listening with a stethoscope, a housecall isn’t helpful. If you phone because you’re worried, it’s unlikely the doctor will tell you not to worry because if he’s wrong, you’ll sue him.

As I’ve written before, when a guest suffers abdominal pain, I feel reassured when there’s diarrhea or vomiting. That usually indicates a stomach virus, miserable but short-lived, and I get the credit when he guest recovers. Pain alone can also be a stomach virus but plenty of serious conditions (gallstones, kidney stones, blood clots) come to mind.  

Medical science has no cure for drunkenness, but hope springs eternal, so hotel staff continue to call.

Curing Hiccups

Every few years a hiccuping hotel guest appeals to me.

Hiccups rarely lasts more than a few hours, so a victim gives credit to his last effort and immediately rushes to his computer to proclaim its benefit. Literally hundreds of treatments exist: proof that all are worthless. Google “hiccups cure” to confirm that you must never look for health advice on the internet.

Long ago when an old doctor described a good treatment, I was skeptical. Even today, hotel visits for hiccups make me nervous, so I give a money-back guarantee. Once in the room, I take a tongue depressor and rub the soft palate at the back of the hiccuper’s throat. Sometimes he or she gags, sometimes not, but so far everyone has been happy to pay my fee.