Um, doctor? Doctor? DOCTOR!!!

If your doctor isn’t listening to you like he or she should be, GET THEIR ATTENTION. This anecdote from foxnews.com, in a story that suggests Americans may get too much health care, illustrates the need for doctors to listen to their patients. Besides getting to the root of the problem, an attentive physician also will not need to assign needless and money-wasting tests, etc.

In a short article published along with the poll in the Archives of Internal Medicine, one doctor recounted the story of a man who developed intractable pain after falling on an icy driveway.
He had several tests at the hospital, but all of them came up empty, writes Dr. Philip Wickenden Bale of the T.J Sampson Hospital in Glasgow, Ky.
All along, the man’s wife had been telling doctors that her husband had a morphine pump in his back to treat chronic pain and that he’d fallen onto the pump. But no one had listened.
“I was beating my head against a wall,” she said, according to Bale.
His prescription? Just listen to your patient.
“Much science and technology, with associated expense, was used to eliminate conditions he didn’t have, while the art of listening well might surely have led to a faster, cheaper remedy,” Bale writes.