Avril Lavigne and the Doctors

Avril Lavigne comes from that Napanee-Kingston area of Ontario that I like so much, and so I was especially interested to learn of her experience with the bumbling doctors who couldn't  diagnose her Lyme Disease:

I, also, had Lyme Disease about ten years ago and went through a similar experience with doctors as she did. I went to four different doctors who had no idea what was wrong. One of my symptoms was that I had swollen, sore joints such that I could hardly move my right arm and my knees. One doctor said I had “water in the joints” and sent me to a joints specialist. The specialist got mad at me and said “You don't have water in the joints” and just ordered me to wear an arm sling and sent me a huge bill. I didn't have insurance at the time so he was able, like the other doctors, to bill me three times what the insurance schedules specify for his “work.”

Ultimately, it was a nurse friend who correctly diagnosed that I had Lyme Disease. I think that most people who have had Lyme would have a special feeling for Avril Lavigne through this. Her bit about the “computer” is a whole additional story that is worthy of the era's deepest criticism and scholarship.

There was another incident this last week which caught the reality of the medical care experience as I know it. This incident got national attention in the US because it was the subject of a Washington Post article. Many elements of that incident ring exactly with my own experience, but especially the bit about the doctors' contempt and hostility. It's as if doctors, like the police, consider the people as the enemy.

I've thought a lot about that over the years - why it is that they are so contemptuous of us when it is supposed to be their vocation to help us in our hour of vulnerability and need. Avril Lavigne very clearly picked up the contempt and hostility of the doctors.

The best explanation I can come up with is that the “social” philosophy, particularly for the last forty years, has been programmatic, conscious selfishness and being ill, vulnerable, in distress, issues a demand for compassion and otherness and anti-selfishness. These qualities are the exact opposite of the ethos of the era, on which the doctors' substantial incomes depend.

Another partial explanation is that they themselves know at some level about their incompetence and inadequacy every bit as much as we do, probably even more than we do.

Perhaps you can offer an explanation. I think people are often hesitant to speak out the way Avril and the Virginian spoke out, because we think that no one will believe what we are saying. I get that all the time. Whenever I point out incidents like these two that I have mentioned here, or of my own similar experience in the medical world, I find that no one believes me. The usual response I get is complete silence. But I hear Avril's heart in that video. I refuse to say that I don't hear it.