4-22-06 Less Meat, More Vegetables - Part 2

After my last rant on this subject, I've had a chance to think about where the doctor's head might be at. Knowing that healthcare professionals tend to have a tremendous capacity for wry humor (my wife is an RN), I figured that what was needed in my "doctor - patient relationship" was some kind of connection with reality. It was abundantly clear to me after two visits (wherein my interaction with the guy added up to merely 5 minutes of actual back and forth communication) that I needed a good sound byte to cut through the social veneer.

I worked on this, on and off, for quite some time. Basically, I came up with nothing. I was, however, well into the headspace needed to come up with something clever to say to him by the time my April 20th appointment took place. As luck would have it, the sound byte materialized and came out of my mouth with no effort at all.

I said, "I've been telling my friends that I made this radical diet change only because my doctor was making death threats..."

Well!

That sure did cut through the social veneer!

This guy is no exception to the aforementioned proclivity for wry humor amongst healthcare professionals. He's a very quick fellow. I have to say that this one very brief moment in our interaction has totally cemented my "doctor - patient relationship" with him.

We can call this the "higher function" in human interaction, I suppose. Call it whatever you want. You know what I'm talking about here. It's no big mystery, and I've talked about it before in this blog. It's that spiritual thing, the psychic connection, the thing you KNOW but never talk about. It happened right there in the doctor's exam room. "BINK!" and suddenly there's a connection.

So, anyway, he paused for a micosecond or two (I told you, this guy is really quick!) and he gave me a "look" and there was that "BINK!" and his whole demeanor took on an instant change. I could call this a sense of recognition on his part. Apparently the shibboleth had been passed. From that point on, the sales pitch for Lipitor or Crestor took on a completely different tone.

Suddenly we're talking about the history of statin drugs, and the basis of his viewpoint on them. I slip in the sound byte regarding the "milano gene," sort of my own sales pitch on the completely different paradigm I'm operating off of in this whole matter of my high cholesterol, and he "gets it" this time (where he hadn't on my previous visit). And all of this rolls along a much different course than it did during my previous two office visits with him. I found myself much more satisfied with our intellectual interaction this time. I felt that he understood what my whole basis was for not wanting to initiate any drug therapy prior to establishing what my baseline body type handling of cholesterol will end up being after eating a healthy diet for at least a year.

He did, however, do his best to establish his basic views on the whole matter by relating his own very recent experience of what it's like to have to tell a patient that they've arrived at a point where they have a condition that's terminal, that there's nothing they're going to be able to to do for the guy. In this case, it was a patient of his with lung cancer. This was his very personal view, and as I said above, from a much different perspective than had been the case between us during the prior two visits. His message was that this was the thing he least wanted to experience with any patient, having to tell anyone that they're going to die.

I saw the sadness in his eyes, the stress this creates in his life, and the simple fact that he sees me as a candidate for this sort of eventuality. An eventuality that he believes he can forestall if I'd just take the damn pills!

It isn't that his viewpoint changed on that matter at all, but that now the interaction was minus the authoritarian element in his demeanor.

We'll find out what the blood test results are, and what my cholesterol levels now are, sometime next week.