Rant #3,304: Bad Medicine

You might remember that a few weeks ago, my regular doctor went out of business without warning.

Unable to find out much about what was going on, l did my digging, and found out that there were some financial improprieties at the practice, forcing the shutdown of the entire four office medical office.

Well, I received an email bright and early yesterday morning making the shutdown official.

The email did not speak directly as to why the practice was shuttered without warning, but it made the close-down official.

I guess the doctor was given the approval to finally, all these weeks later, alert his patients to the closure, because you might remember that when I got through to the doctor on my own, he said he was prohibited from alerting his patients about the closure, which, honestly, made no sense, but ended up being true.

The latest email also gave me a glimmer of hope about my family's medical records.

It said that we could transfer our medical records to our new doctor, if we had one, which is a good thing.

All we had to do was make a written request for the records and send it out using regular mail, and that is exactly what I did first thing in the morning.

Fourteen years ago, when my previous doctor was in jail for peddling drugs to high school students, I tried to get my records, but I was told by the state attorney general that even though my doctor was a jailbird, his license had not been revoked, and he still owned those records--and if I wanted them, I woukd have to pay per page for them.

My records went back decades--including those from the doctor that preceded the jailbird--so it was unfeasible for me to be paying per page for decades of records.

I believe I later found out that when they cleaned out the doctor's office to make it into a residence that was eventually sold, all the records ended up in a dumpster--the bulk of my records were on paper, as much of my time there was during the pre-Internet days--and that if I wanted my records, I could search for them in there.

No way!

So this time, at least my new doctor will have my medical records ... but as you can imagine, based on past experience, I am not holding my breath on this.

But I guess thst yesterday's email put a bow on this entire situation, and I am glad that I was able to find a new doctor relatively quickly.

So that ends that ... I hope.

I certainly don't need to get sick over this for a second time.