It's high time we took a hard look at Longmont's Good Ol' Boy's Medical Pulmonolgist Club where you better behave, patient, or be banned from the doctor's door.

Never mind, doctor, that you took the oath of Hippocrates to "do no harm." Never mind, O medical specialist, that the patient needed medical assistance, but you turned him down because he refused to accept a member of the "club" whose '06 medical report I rejected because it reeked of errors -- a pulmonologist crony from the medical cadre of idiot savants.

(Douglas is one of us, said Charles, the chairman of the Good Ol' Boys. Maybe he's a little incompetent, but let's turn a blind eye and insist that he be the mouthy patient's doc.)

Nor do I, a patient and customer, appreciate watching you, the lung specialist, chew gum 23 chomps per 15 seconds. That's tantamount to a pulse rate of 92...your hasty time-squeezed visits were less appreciated than your interaction with the patient and his wife.

Then there's the cardiologist, a member of another club, who didn't show up for an 11 a.m. angiogram somehow rescheduled for 2:30 p.m., a nurse said, and didn't make that one. For him I had a few choice suggestions that had to do with ...where the sun doesn't shine.

From my correspondence to that doctor who displayed a blatant disregard for medical integrity:

"At 82, Charles, time is of the essence. Your loss of eight hours is little more than a poop in a barrel. I value what time I have left. As a split-second man, I was able to survive where others didn't. You have robbed me of eight hours of life. Maybe I should sue.

You and your sophisticated, specialized lot are part of an over-rated contingent who can give us old buggers 5 to 10 minutes for $150 and send us on our way; - your heart is so full of charity, Charles."

And there's the family doctor who stole 75 minutes of my life - 45 on one visit and 30 in another. Late appointments plus bad advice. I fired him, too.

And the VA podiatrist who looked at the foot and ruled that it couldn't be repaired - age. So the patient went to the foot and ankle clinic in Longmont, relying on Medicare for payment. The foot surgeon said surgery was not complicated and a date was set.

A 74 page section titled, "The Proclivities of Medicine", in David Alter's book, Intrepidations & Funny Business, takes the medical profession to task for its sloppiness and blatant disregard for medical integrity.

Most recent proclivity: Charles Gray, the Westminster epileptic who died at the University of Colorado Hospital, during an epileptic seizure while his monitor was away.

Anton Chekov's evaluation of medicine men of his day stands up in today's evaluation of the profession. Chekov was a short-story writer and playwrite.

He was a medical doctor who knew what members of his kind were all about. He left the profession saying, "Doctors are the same as lawyers. The only difference is that lawyers rob you, whereas doctors rob you (of your time?) and kill you, too."

Alter
owlbeara@comcast.net