A rant on health care and capitalism

As many of you know, I am battling leukemia (doing well these days, BTW). Anyway, I am at a big research hospital now, and yesterday I had an attempted spinal tap. A physician's assistant tried to get into the spinal fluid but was unable to. She said they are successful 90% of the time.

Anyhow, as I understand it, you can use fluoroscopy to find the spine pretty much every time, but I guess a doctor needs to perform it. So I'm figuring they use P.A.'s first because they pay them less than doctors, even figuring in the 10% of the time they have to pay a P.A. AND a doctor. So I (and the hospital) just got unlucky, I guess.

Thanks for reading my little rant. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

is collapsing before our eyes... Its terrible care and yet we are paying tremendous prices...

Keep hanging in there ...:hug:

without fluoroscopy, so I would ASSume (wrong of me, I know) that you might have some sort of structural abnormality making the procedure a little more difficult from the getgo. In fact, I've never seen one performed anywhere but at bedside, although I know they are for people with spinal arthritis more advanced than mine, for example.

The other possibility is that fluoroscopy is a fail safe for using PAs instead of doctors to perform the procedure.

In any case, I'm sorry you had to go through it without success.