The Thing with Medicine

I drove around with a mission on Tuesday night. I trawled Taman Tun (both sections), Sunway Damansara and Mutiara Damansara for clinics yesterday. I needed to find a “family” clinic that operates 24/7 near my area. SS3 is too far from my place where emergencies are concerned. When you’re sick, you don’t want to have to drive too far: it takes up too much energy.

These two weeks have been filled with visits to doctors. First I landed in bed with the flu, then came the lingering cough and now that cough has got my throat all worked up and my ears are wonky because of the after-effects of the flu and the lingering cough. My right eye is also suspiciously red and a bit uncomfortable. I’ve been to the clinic three times in two weeks. For each visit, I’ve ended up with cough mixture and antibiotics. Yesterday I was at the ENT specialist and went home with a tab of Telfast (antihistamine) and two bottles of Nasacort (nasal spray).

Life is one big visit to the doctor’s.

My body feels disrupted and is protesting at ingesting the amount of antibiotics that I’ve been feeding it. I feel like puking after each swallow of antibiotics. It’s the most severe reaction I’ve ever got from taking antibiotics.

The cough isn’t helping either. If a bout of coughing fit lasts too long, it makes me feel like throwing up my insides out. I have two days’ worth of antibiotics left. It still takes me a bit of time to settle in to sleep at night because of the cough.

The doctors at the clinics nowadays don’t tell you what’s wrong with you, like hubby says. They just treat the symptoms. That’s why I like to go to the Chinese doctors. Both for herbal medicine as well as for alternative therapies. They will at least ask you pertinent questions like what have you been eating, what were you doing before this happened, what you are to eat/not to eat, what you should do/shouldn’t do. They don’t just treat you with medicine (they don’t have any!), they take a little bit more time to find out the cause and give you a blueprint to getting better. At the clinic, the doctors don’t ask you for information if you don’t offer it to them.

If I go for my massage treatment, in between my yowls of pain and the doctor painfully pressing my pressure points, I’ll ask him for health advice or tips and he’ll check with me for more details on my health.

I prefer to see the doctors at the clinic late in the night. That’s why I target the 24/7 clinics. True, the ones on duty at night are probably the young interns or someone of that caliber. But at least they have more time to inquire into your general wellbeing. That doesn’t mean that they do. They just have less people seeing them at 2am and hopefully if they are not too sleepy will be more interested in your health.

The best doctor I’ve had so far must be my gynaecologist. He is not only pleasant but he takes the time to explain a whole lot of things that I never think of. Or I can pound him with the same questions over and over again rephrased differently and he will patiently explain it to me as many times over. He doesn’t brush me off as just another patient. When I go in for a consultation, I come out feeling as if my concerns have really been catered to. Or at least he’s given me the opportunity to whine and then given me a solution if I’ve got a problem.

We need more doctors like him. In our society of hurried lives and harried world, our healthcare professionals need to uncover the causes, not just treat illnesses.