More Perils of Common Sense

Fifteen years ago, I broke my leg. After I recovered, the doctor ordered a bone scan that revealed osteoporosis. That’s more frequent in women, but anyone skinny and elderly is at risk.

I began taking a drug for osteoporosis. Every year, I had another bone scan. Sometimes it showed a little improvement, sometimes a little deterioration. After ten years of not much change and a few different drugs, I grew discouraged.

“It looks like this isn’t working,” I said.

The doctor could have been honest (“these drugs usually help, but sometimes they don’t; we’re doing our best”) but instead I heard –

“If you hadn’t taken them, you’d be worse.”

That’s common sense. As I write regularly, if you hear common sense from a doctor it means he doesn’t understand what’s going on. 

It’s no different from the famous ad for a quack remedy: “Cures all but the incurable!”

Real Money

Foreign guests take time counting out my fee because all American bills look alike. Around the world, denominations vary by color, so a quick glance reveals their value. I think America is the only nation with monochromatic money.

When guests mention their difficulty, I explain that we consider colored bills frivolous, like Monopoly money. Real money is green.

I Know It's Not Broken...

“I can walk on it, so it’s not broken…” “I can move it, so it’s not broken….”  Never forget that popular health beliefs are generally wrong. I walked on a painful foot for a week before an X-ray that revealed the fracture.

My greatest service to injured hotel guests is not in diagnosing fractures which is usually impossible but saving them the misery of spending hours in an emergency room. Doctors do little for cracked ribs and broken toes except to relieve pain, so X-rays aren’t necessary. All bets are off with the elderly, but it requires a good deal of violence to break a young bone. Lifting a heavy suitcase won’t do it; experts urge doctors in vain not to order spinal x-rays for minor injuries.

Most injuries are not emergencies, even if a bone is fractured. If guests are willing to wait, I can send them to the more civilized atmosphere of an orthopedist’s office. 

Unable to Check Out of the Hotel

“There’s an emergency with my eye. Can you come right away?”

Hotel doctors don’t like to walk in on emergencies, so I asked him to elaborate.

“I’ve been to the Mayo Clinic where, it’s sad to say because they’re wonderful doctors, they performed the wrong MRI, so the eye is now looking to the right, but it’s not right because I’m a right-thinking citizen who looks both ways before crossing the street….

If a schizophrenic checks into a hotel, I hear about it.  

In its dictionary derivation, schizophrenia comes from the Greek meaning “splitting of the mind.” Hollywood, as usual, gets it wrong in movies featuring entertaining characters with multiple personalities. In fact, split personalities are so rare, some psychiatrists believe they don’t exist. The “split” in schizophrenia doesn’t involve personality but reality. Schizophrenics don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. They find this confusing, but it’s surprisingly uninteresting to observers. Holding a conversation is frustrating.

Like any disease, symptoms wax and wane. Victims with enough connection to reality to check into a hotel may deteriorate and become unable to check out, so employees ask my help. Everyone (the movies again…!) think an injection will fix things. Antipsychotics eliminate delusions, hallucinations, and disordered thinking but do nothing to restore a sense of reality. In any case they may take weeks to work. 

Anxious to relieve themselves of a demented guest, hotels often offer to pay my fee. I once spent an hour in a room with a naked, incoherent man, and since then I try to solve these problems over the phone. Hotel employees may believe they can’t call the police unless there’s a danger, but I assure them that if someone is too helpless to care for himself, the police will take him to the appropriate social agency. It’s OK to call the police for crazy people.    

Cookbook Medicine

Last month, I discussed an educational campaign to persuade doctors to stop doing things that don’t work. Readers wondered at the fuss. I mean, if something doesn’t work, why not forbid it? If penicillin won’t cure your toe fungus, the pharmacist couldn’t fill your prescription. If you arrived at the radiology suite for a CAT scan of your brain, the technician would inform you that CAT scans for migraine are rarely helpful, so he couldn’t do one.

This will never happen. It’s “cookbook medicine” which everyone agrees is bad. Medicine is a science, doctors emphasize – except when someone tells them to do something they don’t want to do. Then medicine is an art, and everyone knows there are no rules in art.

We know from the movies that the hero never follows the book. That’s for fuddy-duddies.  

Here’s an example. Preparing a patient for surgery is a complicated process. It requires dozens of tests, procedures, and reminders. But no one is perfect; nurses and doctors often forget a few. It turns out that the consequences are disastrous. In one study where some surgeons followed a checklist and others didn’t, the death rate dropped by almost half -- from 1.5% to 0.8% with the checklist. Complications dropped from 11% to 7%. Other studies agree.

As a result some nations and many states passed laws requiring checklists for operations.. Hospitals hand them out. Some surgeons take them seriously. Some ignore them. Some consider them more bureaucratic paperwork; they check the boxes whether or not they’ve obeyed. It turns out that commercial airlines also require an elaborate checklist before taking off. Pilots probably obey more often than surgeons, but, for your peace of mind, don’t Google either topic.  

Low Back Pain

Finishing at a hairdresser, a guest at a West Hollywood hotel had bent over and thrown out her back. Now she wanted “a shot” so she could stand and get back to the hotel.

I’ve cared for several hundred guests with back pain. These are fairly satisfying visits. I deliver an injection which makes the patient giddy, so time passes more quickly. By the following day, the pain is not so bad. Back pain slowly improves even if not treated.

Hotel guests are already in bed, and that’s where they stay. This lady would have to move, and over the phone I warned that the injection would not make that easier. Powerful narcotics work best against “deep” pain such as a kidney stone or heart attack, not so well when it’s sharp and acute. If I were to give you a huge dose of morphine and then touch a lit match to your fingertip, you’d feel the usual amount of pain. These warnings rarely work, and they didn’t work this time.

Beverly Hills treats residents kindly. For example, parking is much easier than in surrounding Los Angeles. If you’re just passing through, Beverly Hills shows no mercy. Traffic lights along Santa Monica Boulevard change simultaneously, so there’s no hope of getting through even when streets are empty. During the rush hour, traffic proceeds a few streets at a time. I cultivate tranquility, listen to my CD book, focus on the car ahead, and never look at my watch.  

Fortunately, the beauty shop closed at five, so I encountered only the patient, her companions, and a few employees. I examined her and then delivered the shot, gave pain pills for later, and assured her that she’d feel not-so-bad after a night in bed. Groaning and supported by friends, she hobbled off.

Doctors Should Keep Their Mouths Shut

A teenager at a downtown hotel had strep throat. Unlike most other bacteria, strep remains as sensitive to penicillin as it was seventy years ago. This is good news because penicillin is a terrific drug. It doesn’t upset your stomach, it has few side effects, it’s cheap….

“He’s allergic to penicillin,” said the mother.

“How do you know?” I asked.

She thought for a while. “The doctor told us. I think he had a rash…”

Once you’re branded as allergic to penicillin, no doctor in his right mind will prescribe it. This was bad news because I carry amoxicillin, a form of penicillin, and hand it out gratis. I don’t carry a substitute, so the mother had to find an open pharmacy and pay about twenty times amoxicillin’s price.

Ten percent of the population believes they’re allergic to penicillin and almost all are wrong. Ninety percent wrong is the usual figure, but some studies find almost zero genuine penicillin allergies.

What happened in this case? Chances are, years earlier the doctor prescribed a penicillin either to treat an infection or as a placebo, and the patient’s mother noticed a rash a few days later. Everyone knows that chicken pox and measles and rubella produce a rash, but any viral infection, including the common cold, can produce a pink, spotty eruption. To make matters worse, five or ten percent of everyone who takes amoxicillin or Augmentin (which contains amoxicillin) develops a similar rash. It’s harmless and disappears in a few days. Stopping the antibiotic doesn’t speed this up.

Experts agree that none of these are allergies.  

But why take a chance? Laymen worry. It’s 100 percent safe (and much quicker) to diagnose an allergy.

If a doctor had told you to flush $1000 down the toilet, you’d object, but that’s the equivalent if you go through life with a nonexistent penicillin allergy. If you’re lucky!... Rarely, you could be in serious trouble.

Skin tests are accurate, so you might want to see an allergist. It costs a few hundred dollars which insurance might not cover.