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Back to the Forum 2006
Archives I was recently compelled to dismiss my ophthalmologist. Considering that I have serious macular degeneration, this was a serious move on my part. The letter I sent to him explains it. Notice that I omitted his name. I am seriously dissatisfied with this person, but not to the extent that I would want to threaten his patient doctor relationships. It's as much about his staff as it is about his attitude. Even so, I am not inclined to be polite with this person. Proper, yes. Polite, no. As to Diversified Receivables Management Inc, it's just a collection agency. Willie Gaffer will have a great deal more to say about the lowlifes who run these outfits in another essay.
Dr. X, M.D. Copies: Dr. X: The purpose of this letter is twofold. One is to cancel my appointment with you on February 1, 2006 at 9:30. Second is to take vigorous issue with the shabby treatment afforded me by your staff. In brief, your people made a mistake, blamed me for it, and sicced a bully boy bill collector on me. That was an emotionally violent insult against my character and my personal integrity. It is completely unacceptable. This whole debacle came about because your people ignored our input, discarded the proper address we gave them, and decided to use an address that has been invalid for two years. There is some question as to how they got the invalid address. I suspect they got it from Dr. Y's staff. They were another group of people who were very careless about record keeping. Regardless of the how of it, your people had the right information and discarded or ignored it. In fact, we expected to get a bill for copay from you. When, after several weeks, the bill was not forthcoming my wife went to your office. There she inquired about the bill and a woman gave her a copy (copy enclosed) of a bill with a due date of January 14, 2006. That was on January 2, 2006. The very next day my wife sent a check for the full amount to your office. That should have been the end of it. It was not. On January 9, 2006 I received an intimidating threatening dun from Diversified Receivables Management Inc. When that woman in your office spoke with my wife on January 2 she had to know that bill had been put in collections, yet she gave my wife no indication that there was anything amiss. She should also have taken the bill out of collections. She did not. What that woman did was either totally incompetent or totally unethical. Take your pick. The simple truth is, we did not pay your bill because you did not send it to us. It is possible that your people sent a bill to the wrong address. I have no way of knowing the facts of that either way. I do know if they sent that bill the USPS would have returned it marked with a no-such-address stamp. That should have been a clue even for a minimum wage airhead. A simple phone call would then have resolved your problem. Instead, you chose to attack me. That was not the end of it. Your people's evasions and duplicities continued when my wife went back to your office on January 11, 2006. At that time, the woman who spoke for you insisted that she had no record of our correct address. To me, that simply means she lied, lost it, or destroyed it. When my wife asked her how the bill collector had got our correct address, she said it was his job to find people. That begs the question, what does she think her job is? Is it to emotionally assault and insult your clients without provocation, to send bully boy thugs after them? When my wife asked why she had not called us she claimed we were probably not home when she called. When my wife pointed out that we have an answering machine, the woman tried to wiggle around but she had nothing useful to say. Once again, she was caught in her own sticky web of duplicity. The theme through all of this is one of failure on the part of your people in proper procedure. Reviewing the facts, it is difficult for me to see how all of it could be simply the result of mistakes on your part. Certainly the failure of your staff to take this thing out of collections when you were clearly in the wrong indicates malicious intent. Whether there was intent or simply incredible incompetence and indolence is really irrelevant to my wife and me. The mental anguish and sleepless nights we suffered because of this would have been the same. I will never forgive your people for that. On January 11 your person also told my wife that she had finally taken the bill out of collections as soon as she received our check. Considering the history of duplicity, I find any pronouncements coming out of your office to be dubious at best. I happen to hate attorneys even more than I hate bill collectors. I consider both to be below leeches on the evolutionary scale. I definitely do not want to deal with an attorney. Please do not force me to go down that path. If your people have not already done so, have the good sense to call off your bully boy bill collector and end it now. I expect and want no apology from you. As to canceling the appointment, it is only partly related to the incompetence of your staff. I would have done that anyway. My main reason for canceling is I have no confidence in you as a medical professional. That has to do with my understanding of macular degeneration and how I must deal with it. Whether you intended it or not, on August 1, 2005, I left your office in almost complete despair. You had almost convinced me that my situation was hopeless. I was destined to become legally blind at some time in the future. Whether you intended it or not, my take on your mindset was: I am not a person who just lays down and quits, so I did some research of my own. I discovered that none of those conclusions are necessarily true. There are very promising research efforts going on at the University of Washington by Dr. Thomas Reh and others. There is also work being done at the University of California. There researchers have discovered a protein called growth and differentiation factor 11(GDF11) that stimulate stem cells into developing into photo-receptors. It seems the retina has what are called progenitor stem cells which can develop into rods, cones, and other cells. What the researchers did is identify this protein GDF11 which controls their development. The important point in this is there is no need to inject stem cells into the macula. They are already there in abundance. All they need is a trigger of the genetic blueprints that will cause them to grow into red, green, and blue cones. There is also other work going on, in DNA for example, using what are called nano-particles to deliver healthy-genes to the eye. I can also mention a microchip technology being experimented with wherein microchips are implanted in the eye. I found all of this information by following website links from a brochure I found in your office. No one told me they existed or gave me any hope at all. All in all, there seems to be a great deal of promising work going on and there is very good reason to hope for a solution in the near future. Hope is the one thing you did not offer me. At this time, I am not convinced that you can do anything for me. If, in the future, I feel I need help with my problem I will seek out someone who sees all of science and particularly his discipline as an evolving art form rather than a closed and fixed bound book of unchanging and unchangeable facts. William E. Steinman:
I find this lack of interest in growth to be a perennial problem
with many professionals. I have know lawyers, engineers, and
doctors who never cracked a book once they got their degree.
I found it to a large degree in the engineering community, because
I worked with these people for many years. There were a handful
who made serious efforts to stay abreast of developments. Most
did not. For doctors, this can become a very dangerous thing.
It could have doomed me to blindness in this particular case,
if I had trusted this guy. I did not. In fact, I rarely trust
anyone and when I do, I invariably get burned. Especially in
cases involving my health, I thing doing my own research is a
heathy thing, as it were. I may still go blind, but not because
I did not check all of my options.
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