Old Fashioned Medicine
We keep up with technology for senior citizens, but there’s also a warm comfortable feeling in “old fashioned” — like driving my VW Bug for 38 years and living on-and-off the same boat for 35 years. Christl feels the same especially in doctor-patient relations. She enjoys explaining things to her patients. Most of her colleagues have little time or patience for endless discussions with patients that come armed with a list of questions and Google searches for a typical office visit with a busy waiting room.
Christl and I were reminiscing about a pivotal moment in our busy lives when she was writing her thesis for a medical degree and I was sailing with a Dutch/German friend in Russian waters. After rounding the North Cape of Norway, we headed for Archangel, Russia. There, almost a quarter century ago, we made contact over CompuServe. It was the first online service to offer Internet service as early as 1989 via email. (See links to stories on Putin and Computer Hacking in Russia.)
She was struggling with some statistics about the immune system. “From Russia with Love” as Ian Fleming and James Bond would say, I helped guide her through the now ancient Lotus 1 2 3 to make sense of her numbers and display them in graphic form. She received a cum laude on her dissertation.
We have both come a long way in the Internet World. I routinely post stories on Medium and less frequently slideshows on YouTube. We both do Google and Wikipedia researches. She keeps patient files in Microsoft Excel and Intuit QuickBooks. I read books on a smartphone with the Libby App from libraries in Florida and Bavaria. We are fans of Google Maps and Night Sky and SkyView for star searching. We both feel relatively up-to-date with technology but increasingly uncomfortable with constant updates of software, privacy issues, or hassles in an increasingly hard to understand in a fast moving technology world.
She desires to keep up her practice as a calling/hobby so that she can serve her aging patients who want time with doctors in a comforting settings to discuss their ailments and treatments. Many patients complain to her that modern sterile offices and a lot of physician assistants wandering around with tablet computers are not comfortable. These elderly patients feel more comfortable with lengthy doctor talks in a cozy setting. Many doctors, on the other hand, need a financial return on every square meter of space and every minute of time in order to pay for expensive equipment, rent, and a handsome salary.
She has quite a few patients who bring along children and grandchildren for eye exams. We have set aside a comfortable living-room-like setting for her practice that overlooks a chestnut tree alley and encourages such talks for the aging as well as their children and grandchildren. It works and the patients are grateful. In addition to paying their medical bills, she is often the recipient of bottles of wine, plants, and fruits. That is definitely an old-fashioned tradition.
Some of the medical equipment in her office dates back more than half a century. In good hands, the instruments deliver good results with up-to-date modern advice. More modern equipment may be easier to use and churn out quicker results but with more “updates” and more “glitches.” I enjoy fixing things, especially old-fashioned electrical circuits that aren’t buried in a micro-chip deep inside a sealed gadget.
We are both having fun with the Praxis and I get yearly eye examinations for free!
