Doctor, Doctor

I was recently chatting with a friend who is due to have a baby soon, and the discussion turned to preparation for delivery. (Strangely, we never, ever had such conversations back when we were bar-hopping twenty-somethings just out of college.) My friend mentioned that an acquaintance of hers was using an alternative method. When I asked whether this person was going to have her baby at home in a bathtub full of water, my friend made a face for a moment and then went on this brief but thoroughly amusing rant.

"I'm all for natural child birth, but I'm really tired of hearing about how women used to come out of the fields just long enough to have their baby in some hut and then turn around and go right back to work. I want to have my baby in a tastefully decorated room, surrounded by a lot of large, very expensive machines and a cadre of people in white coats with a lot of letters behind their names."

"If one more person tells me about the horrible things caused by modern medicine, I'm going to punch them. You know what modern medicine does? It prevents death. And I'm OK with that."

When she was done with her Dennis Miller-esque soliloquy, I was still laughing. And, after thinking about it, I have to wholeheartedly agree. If I am going to entrust my family's health and well-being to someone, I expect them to be on their game and up-to-date on their medical journals. If some holistic-minded throwback of a doctor ever tries to prescribe me an apple-a-day or laughter, he may very well find himself in need of medical attention.

I have no issues with holistic medicine; in fact, I am sure there is a lot of wisdom there that is untapped by traditional Western medicine. Still, I am not prepared to ignore the benefits of the training and equipment that stocks our hospitals today. Technology has given us some fantastic tools, so why not use them? Who, besides the Amish, would choose to use a horse-drawn carriage when you could drive a car instead? If an MRI will give a picture of what's going on inside my knee, then let's take the picture! I am paying way too much for medical insurance to have my doctor settle for "I think" when a test could turn that into "I know."

That said, it can definitely be annoying, not to mention expensive, to have to endure test after test just because somebody in another state had some extremely rare condition 20 years ago, and no one can think of a reason why you might not have it too. During my wife's last pregnancy, every trip to the doctor/hospital featured the appearance of a nurse wearing a cartridge belt stocked with test tubes like some sort of medical gunslinger. And the scary part was knowing that she wouldn't leave until every one of those test tubes was full of my wife's blood. She would rattle off a litany of tests for which the blood was allegedly needed, but I always suspected that she was secretly feeding either a vampire or a massive swarm of pet mosquitoes.

OK, so our system has some problems, but if you ask me, medicine just isn't one of those areas in which you can hearken back to a simpler time. Sure, it was a lot simpler when the doctor treated you with leeches, and you could pay him with a chicken, but I'll pass. It's not that I don't think a good bloodletting is worth a chicken; I imagine it's easily worth two chickens and a goat. It just doesn't matter, though, because I'm sure my insurance wouldn't cover the procedure.