The Most Difficult Calls

I stopped chopping an onion when the phone rang. A young man at the Airport Hilton was vomiting.

For a hotel doctor, a difficult call refers not to an illness but to traffic conditions. It was four o’clock, so I would drive eight miles both ways during the freeway rush hour, returning hungry and with no dinner prepared. I delay some visits but not for acutely miserable symptoms.

Before I left, the phone rang again. I yearned to hear that it was another airport hotel, but the guest was downtown, fifteen miles in the opposite direction. Worse, she had a migraine, so I couldn’t delay.

Delivering medical care is sometimes challenging. Always challenging and the mark of a seasoned hotel doctor is the ability to remain serene in gridlock.

Certain rules apply. Unless lanes are closed, leaving the freeway for city streets is a bad idea. Another rule is that blocking a lane at any hour stops traffic cold. Steady movement, however slow, is simply a sign of congestion.

“I wonder if there’s an accident,” I thought a dozen times after several minutes of immobility, but I never saw one. So much for rules.

Two housecalls which normally take two hours took four and a half, but I maintained my serenity, sucking on the hard candy I bring along to dull my hunger and listening to a novel on my CD.

"Wow! Hotel Doctors Charge That Much?"

Guests don’t say that. Mostly I hear: “Could I talk to my husband and call you back.…..?”

Unlike the competition, I don’t confine myself to upscale hotels. Plenty of Holiday Inns, Ramadas, and motels call, and I quote fees less than the going rate. Colleagues complain but admit that it’s not a competitive advantage because hotels don’t care what the doctor charges. Still, counting driving time, a hotel visit rarely takes less than an hour, so it’s not cheap.

Helpless in a strange country and forewarned that medical care in America requires vast sums, foreign guests are easier to deal with.

America medical insurance takes a dim view of housecalls. No hotel doctor accepts it, so Americans, already disoriented at finding a doctor willing to make a housecall, learn that they must pay out of their pocket. It’s a shock.

Like all doctors, I like to present myself as a humanitarian, and I often reduce my fee if the guest feels too miserable to leave the room, but mostly, when Americans object, I send them to an urgent care clinic.

Walking through a clinic door costs around $100. While this is much less than a housecall, clinics charge extra for tests, procedures, shots, and supplies, and the patient must find a pharmacy and then pay for the prescription. I don’t charge extra for anything. Telling all this to guests sounds too much like a sales pitch, so I simply send them to a clinic. Insurance might pay part of their bill.

Disappointment

Loews guest was suffering flu symptoms, but mostly he worried about his temperature. I explained that the fever was not an ominous sign. If he wanted to check, he could buy a thermometer. Or I could come to the hotel. He opted for the visit. I told him how much it would cost.

“Oh… I thought it was free,” he said.

I’d heard that before. Your doctor doesn’t answer when you dial, but I do. Naïve guests think I’m downstairs awaiting their call.

He was from Chile. Did he buy travel insurance before coming to the US, I asked. He did. I explained that travel insurance pays for housecalls, and most insurance agencies call me. However, he must phone the insurance first to obtain approval. He promised to do so. 

Half an hour later my phone rang. It wasn’t Loews but the Doubletree. An elderly man had undergone electrical cardioversion for atrial fibrillation – an irregular heartbeat – a month earlier, and he was worried. His heart didn’t feel right. I asked him to count his beats; he counted 80 per minute. That is not particularly fast. I assured him that he wasn’t describing anything dangerous. He wanted me to check him.

These are the best visits. A guest is worried, and I’m already convinced that there’s nothing to worry about. Sure enough, the exam was normal. He was delighted at the news, and I was delighted to deliver it. Everyone was happy.

I was even more delighted to drive to the Doubletree because it’s only a few blocks from Loews. At any minute, I expected a call from the Loews guest’s insurance agency for another easy visit. But it never came.

My Career as a Diet Doctor

Long before taking up hotel doctoring, I answered an ad from a physician who offered “weight control.”

Every era has a weight loss miracle. During the 1970s it was human chorionic gonadotropin, HCG, a respectable hormone involved in reproduction. There were the usual flurry of bestsellers and HCG clinics, and then it went into a decline although it remains in the armamentarium at plenty of shady clinics.  

My doctor was a regular GP who merely made it known that he offered HCG. I doubt diet patients made up ten percent of the practice, but they provided an impressive cash flow. The women (only a rare male) came in weekly for a shot, a diet sheet, and a pep talk from the nurse. The doctor saw them monthly, but they paid the regular fee for every visit. He never claimed (to me) that HCG worked, only that patients believed in it, so it inspired them to stick to the diet.

But it didn’t inspire them. Any motivated patient who starts a diet, legitimate or silly, will lose ten or twenty pounds before the gnawing of hunger becomes tiresome. Losing more is much harder. This was no news to the HCG patients, but they were not paying good money to hear it. Their stubbornness amazed me. They signed up with the usual enthusiasm, came in for their shots, followed the diet, and lost their ten or twenty pounds. Then they stopped losing, but most continued to come in, month after month, taking the weekly shot and paying the fee.

Despite the universal opinion among the thin that dieters fail because they cheat, most of these women were trying hard. Alas, they were butting up against the ten-twenty pound limit. Losing more requires a tighter diet, self-denial, and regular exercise, a difficult feat.

Dropping that initial weight turns out to be a good thing. Ninety percent of dieting’s health benefits (reduced risk of diabetes, lower cholesterol, less heart disease) are achieved by a ten percent weight loss. Alas, few patients thrilled to that knowledge because better health was not their goal. Many asked if the shot worked. At first, loyal to my employer, I admitted that opinion was divided. Eventually my answers grew blunt. This never offended the patients who were already suspicious. Many did not even drop out, but the news got back to my boss.

A Disorder I've Never Seen

“I’ve been trying to pick up stuff, and I can’t,” said a Ramada guest over the phone.

“You mean your arm is weak?” I asked.

“No. Once I grab it, it’s OK.”

“Is it numb?”

“It feels fine. But when I reach out for something, I miss it. It’s weird.”

The guest was elderly but in good health. I suspected I knew the problem.

“Take your forefinger and touch your nose,” I suggested. “Can you do it?”

“No,” he said. “I keep hitting my face.”

This was something I’d never encountered but luckily I remembered medical school neurology. This lady had suffered a cutoff of blood to her cerebellum, a structure at the base of the brain that controls coordination.

When you reach out, the brain instructs muscles to move your arm in the general direction of your goal. That’s the best it can do. The last few inches don’t require strength or mobility but fine, precise movements. That’s where the cerebellum takes over.

With the cerebellum out of action, you’d have normal consciousness, strength, and sensation but no coordination. You could walk but only slowly with a clumsy, wide-based gait. If you reached for something, your hand would wobble wildly as it approached. The classic test is to ask a patient to put a finger on her nose. With the cerebellum out of action, it’s almost impossible.

It could have been a temporary loss of blood supply, a “transient ischemic attack” (TIA) or a permanent loss, a stroke. Waiting to see which would be unwise, so I urged her to go to a hospital.

A Dog-Eat-Dog Business, Part 5

I was attending a guest at Le Mondrian when there was a knock. The guest was not dressed, so I opened the door to find myself eye-to-eye with another doctor. I recognized him as one of the new concierge physicians eager to serve hotels, including mine.

Hotels occasionally summon a second doctor when the first is slow arriving. The sight of this doctor meant that Le Mondrian had called him first, unsettling news.

“Looks like a communications slip-up,” he said cheerfully. “It’s nobody’s fault,” he added. “But it’s only fair, since we both made the trip, that we split the fee.”

I closed the door in his face and went back to work. When I returned to the lobby, the concierge apologized for the mix up, blaming the impatient guest.

She handed me an envelope. A few luxury hotels prefer paying me directly and adding it to the guest’s bill. When I counted the money later, I saw it was too little. She had given half to the other doctor. If she hadn’t, I realized, she wouldn’t have received her referral fee.

The Free Market Strikes Again!

I spend less than $1,000 a year for supplies, so giving them out gratis is no sacrifice. Two or three times a year, I place an order at a pharmaceutical web site. It’s easy, but sometimes I get a jolt.  

I hand out doxycycline, an old antibiotic and the recommended treatment for the most common pneumonia and the most common sexually transmitted disease. In 2012 I paid $50 for a bottle of five hundred. That’s twenty-five treatments which works out to $2.00 for each. When I ran low in 2014 I decided to reorder. Checking the web revealed that five hundred seemed to cost $1,655. That couldn’t be right, so I looked around, but it wasn’t a typo. So I ordered azithromycin, effective and about $4.00 per treatment.

This happens regularly. Remember penicillin? You may think it’s obsolete, but it remains a superb antibiotic and the best treatment for common infections from strep throat to syphilis. Twenty years ago it was as cheap as aspirin. I could buy a thousand for $30. Now the price is $130 and rising.

Here’s what happens. As a drug gets older and older, it gets cheaper and cheaper. But doctors like newer drugs. Everyone (you included) believes they are immune to advertising, but you’re not, and doctors are no different.

It’s a good rule that any drug in an ad is wildly expensive and not superior. Look at the ad: if it doesn’t say the drug is the best, it isn’t. A few years ago Avelox or Levoquin would cure your pneumonia as well as doxycycline at forty times the cost. Doxycycline at $1655 a bottle still costs less but not by as much.

As doctors incline toward a new drug, they prescribe the older one less. Pharmacies buy less. Pharmaceutical companies stop making it. Eventually the remaining companies notice the absence of competition, and the free market works its magic.