What Are Those Doctors Doing?

It was found that doctors were misdiagnosing potential food borne illnesses as the stomach flu. Dr. Edward Hill, assistant professor of family medicine at the North Mississippi Medical Center is just one of the men making an attempt to make physicians aware of the problem.

Caroline DuWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has seen examples of this happen. She says parents with very sick children were being sent home repeatedly because doctors thought the children weren’t sick enough.

Food borne illnesses take the lives of an estimated 5,000 people a year and leaves 300,000 hospitalized.

Officials are worried about doctors brushing off what could be a life threatening disease or illness. To put an end to this, the AMA, together with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are issuing primers to help doctors diagnose and treat food borne diseases more efficiently. 15,000 kits will be available to physicians at no cost. Doctors will be told to ask more questions concerning the foods that have been eaten.

A patient that experiences a high temperature, stiff neck, a rigid stomach, dry mouth, or bloody diarrhea is advised to see a doctor if symptoms last longer than 3 days. Antibiotics, intravenous hydration, or anti-nauseas medications for food poisoning are sometimes given.

Find out more about the AMA and what it is doing to prevent further misdiagnosis at their website, http://www.ama-assn.org/foodborne.

So, are doctors spending less time with us than they should? Almost every visit lasts no longer than 10 minutes, depending on the situation. You would think they would take their time and be patient so that we may ask questions that we have. After all, they are being paid for their time. Sometimes doctors seem like they are in such a rush that you don’t want to hold them up for some stupid question you want to ask. No question is a stupid question and we, and paying patients, should have the right to take up as much time as we need.

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