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Care without compassion: ‘Where do I go?’

By GLYNIS HART
[email protected]
Crisis in the health care system – Part 1

CLAREMONT – There’s a crisis in the health care system, but it’s not just on the economic side. While the national debate swings from Medicare for All to repealing the Affordable Care Act, patients complain that a for-profit health care system leaves one critical thing out: compassion for those suffering from pain and disease. In the first article of a three-part series the Eagle Times looks at the effects on health care of the computer age.

A human being behind the symptoms

Gerald Becker lived with chronic pain after falling down a flight of steps and having had three major operations on his neck. One day last fall, he sat on a stool at the Tumble Inn diner, talking about suicide.

“If I committed suicide tonight, the only thing you’d hear about me is, ‘Do you know he was a drug addict?’” said Becker bitterly. Becker was waiting for a friend who said she could help him get a legal prescription for Suboxone. He had insurance, but that wasn’t helping much. (Becker passed away, not by his own hand, before this story went to print.)

Until September 2017 Becker’s doctor, Anna Konopka, helped him manage his pain but after she retired, he struggled to find another doctor who would. Many practitioners avoid chronic pain patients because they’re afraid to overprescribe painkillers — a practice that led to the current opioid-addiction epidemic.

“The only doctor that took me in, made me feel better, she even got me walking, got fired,” said Becker of Konopka. “Doctors think you just want opiates.”

According to Becker, Dr. Konopka was able to help him reduce his prescriptions for painkillers. However, Konopka, who is in her 80s, was forced into retirement because she refused to go to computer-aided billing.

“Where do I go? What’s supposed to happen to me?” Becker asked, and then returned to his thought: “If I committed suicide tonight, the only thing they’d care about is if I was a drug addict.”

Konopka, who grew up in Poland and received her medical degree in the United States, predicted recent changes in the medical system will lead to more death and more disease.

“The whole system is destroying the relationship between the patients and the doctors,” said Konopka. In 18 years of private practice, Konopka said she took as much as two hours to talk to each patient, “depending on how complicated their problem is.

“Every patient should be treated differently because everybody is different,” she said. “I think these new doctors do not see the patient; they look it up on the computer and see guidelines and prescribe to guidelines. They cannot be practicing medicine with this kind of clinical approach. It’s too much reliance on machines and technology.

“They don’t even know how to examine a patient; to auscultate the abdomen, to use their hands. This kind of skill is lost. Right now bureaucrats and politicians, they try to run medicine. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

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