Can I Submit This to My Insurance?

The guest’s symptoms suggested a urine infection, one of my favorite diseases. They’re miserable but respond quickly to antibiotics. This looked like a good visit. I quoted my fee.

“Oh… I didn’t realize it would be so much.”

This happens. I remember guests from the Four Seasons where room rates start at $600 who didn’t want to pay half that. In any case, once I mention the fee, I consider it tacky to refuse someone who complains. I quoted a lower fee. That was OK.

It was a good visit. I tested her urine, announced she had an infection, and handed over her medicine. She was grateful. As I left, she indicated my invoice.

“Can I submit this to my insurance?”

“You have travel insurance?”

“I think so. They made us buy something for this trip.”

It was too late to ask why, if she had insurance, she had objected to my fee. But this also happens. In every developed country except Russia and China, if you need a doctor you don’t first decide if you can afford it, so foreign tourists often pay little attention to insurance.

You Don't Need a Better Medicine

“My doctor gave me amoxicillin a week ago, and my sinuses are still blocked. I need a stronger antibiotic,” said a guest.

If a medicine isn’t working the next step is never to find a better medicine but to discover why it isn’t working. Sometimes there’s a problem that medicine won’t help.

Sometimes the patient needs a better exam. Pain on urination usually means a urine infection, and I’ve seen several patients whose urine infection didn’t go away after a course of treatment. They didn’t have a urine infection but herpes. It was obvious when you looked, but the doctor hadn’t looked.

Sometimes the patient needs to wait. After rubbing cream on an insect bite, patients worry when it grows to an itchy patch several inches around. I explain that insect bites generally worsen for two days and then resolve over the following days.

Sometimes the next step is to stop taking medicine. Treating pinkeye with drops usually helps, but patients occasionally return to complain that they’re worse. That’s because the drop has begun to irritate the eye. A few days after stopping, they feel better.

My malpractice lawyer warns me to warn you to read this purely for your own amusement. Only in mathematics can a statement be 100 percent true.

So if a medicine isn’t working, don’t stay away from the doctor on the grounds that I said it was OK.

Should I Make a Housecall?

Only half my callers require one.

As I repeat, I’m happy to phone a pharmacy when guests forget legitimate medication: blood pressure pills, heart pills, contraceptives, etc. I don’t do this for guests who tell me “I had the same thing last year, and my doctor prescribed……” 

Exceptions exist. If a caller has had gout I believe him. It’s acceptable to treat a young woman with a typical bladder infection over the phone. If you’re wondering about symptoms of a “typical” bladder infection, I’m not telling. You have to tell me. Most “my doctor prescribes...” calls concern upper respiratory infections where the guest has received the traditional placebo antibiotic and believes he needs another.

Guests with stuffy ears don’t object if told they need a housecall, but I resist the temptation because ordinary congestion causes bilateral ear discomfort without pain. Over the phone, I advise aggressive use of nasal spray before takeoff and before the plane descends.

Injuries can be tricky. A doctor’s exam rarely diagnoses a fracture, but most common injuries are not urgent, even when a fracture is present. If guests are willing to wait until business hours, I can send them to an orthopedist’s office, more civilized than an emergency room. For back pain, a housecall is better. If you go where there’s an x-ray, you’ll get one, and experts agree that back x-rays are almost never helpful.

Much of my decision on making a housecall depends on the law of averages. Chest pain in a fifty year-old is usually not serious, but it’s unwise to assume this. It’s less unwise in a twenty year-old. A sore throat in a child or adolescent might be strep which medical science can cure. After age fifty it’s almost unheard of. I’ve never seen a case.

Another Freebie

A guest at the Georgian hotel in Santa Monica wanted a housecall, said the desk clerk. She had a urine infection.

That was good news. The Georgian was not far, and urine infections are easy.

“The guest has gone to dinner,” the clerk added. “She’d like you to come at 9 o’clock.”

I hate it when hotels make an appointment without consulting me. I want to talk to guests before a visit. They need to know how much I charge and that they’ll have to pay directly. Learning this, some guests reconsider. A few guests assume the doctor is in the hotel, so it’s no big deal if they’re late or decide to skip the consultation entirely. Finally, it’s stressful to kill time at home, hoping another call doesn’t arrive to complicate matters.

Sure enough, at 8:30, as I was about to leave, the phone rang. A guest at the Airport Hilton was vomiting. Vomiters don’t like to wait. There was no way to contact the Georgian guest to suggest a delay, but I decided I could make the visit and reach the Hilton in an hour. I hurried off.

Freeway traffic stopped cold at my exit. Santa Monica was holding an arts festival. The streets were jammed.  Normally, I would park and walk the six blocks to the hotel, but this would make me outrageously late for the poor vomiter at the Hilton.

Guests usually agree to wait when I explain the problem. The Georgian guest was back in her room.

“I just flew in from London. There’s no way I can stay awake,” she said on hearing that I’d like to return later that evening.

In the end, I phoned a prescription for a urine infection into a nearby pharmacy and then drove to the airport.

Ignoring the Lab

A young woman complained that urinating was painful, and she was running frequently to the bathroom.

That sounded like the common bladder infection, my favorite disease. It’s one of the infections that antibiotics treat, and patients usually feel better within a day. Everyone is pleased.

After arriving in the room, I asked for a urine sample and took a dipstick from a bottle I carry. It can detect sugar and blood and protein and half a dozen other substances in urine, but in this case I was looking for white blood cells (a sign of infection) and leukocyte esterase, a chemical that bacteria produce. Both tests were negative. What was going on? Her story and all the evidence pointed to a bladder infection.

Every medical student learns to treat the patient, not the test. The test showed that she didn’t have a bladder infection, but I disagreed, and I turned out to be right.