A few weeks ago I was feeling pretty bad so I told my doctor I thought I had Lyme disease again.
When I visit the doctor I tend to want to leave as quickly as possible. I forget everything that was bothering me. I don’t want to list every ache and pain or I’ll end up sounding like a hypochondriac. I don’t think I am, but would like to know what you call someone who thinks he’s a hypochondriac and really isn’t.
To make sure that I told the doctor everything, my 13-year old daughter Kelsey made a list of my complaints. The list was a long one: a lot of pain in my legs, especially my knees and ankles; pain in all my joints; pain in my fingers; headaches; general weakness and lack of energy; brain fog. (Some might think that last one is normal for me.)
Doctor’s visits always start the same. After they make a copy of your insurance card and you pay the visit fee, you sit in the waiting room for a while. When your name is called you go into an examining room and wait there a little longer.
Then a nurse takes your vital signs, and you’re left alone again until the doctor comes in. This took some time because the office was very busy.
The doctor asked me how I felt. I didn’t want to bother her about some nagging pain that probably meant I was just getting older. But Kelsey’s list got in the way of a quick getaway. I ended up with a blood test and a prescription for doxycycline, and a follow up visit for the next week.
That appointment started exactly the same. While I was waiting for the doctor after the nurse checked my vital signs, I got to thinking.
My temperature, blood pressure, and pulse were normal, just like last time. The blood test was probably going to come back with a positive result for Lyme, but that would not mean I had been bitten again. It could be the same infection from last fall.
A couple of weeks on doxycycline left me feeling much better, last fall. This had to be Lyme again; at least that’s all I hoped it was.
I did feel better now after a week on the antibiotic, just like I had back then. That doesn’t show up in a blood test, or in my vital signs.
Not that vital signs are unimportant. They help to establish a baseline, so you can determine what’s normal for an individual. But they only offer clues that something may be wrong. And even if they look healthy, you may not be.
Pain, on the other hand, is subjective.
I can tell her how I feel on a scale of 1 to 10. But my doctor can’t tell whether something is seriously wrong with me or I’m just a big wimp who can’t handle a little inevitable age-related arthritis.
I think this is why we say doctors practice medicine.
We spend a lot of time measuring things, and then trying to draw conclusions from those measurements. This is helpful most of the time, but sometimes it isn’t.
I get annoyed when I see people jumping to conclusions because of some numbers they just picked up somewhere.
Maybe it’s something Carl Jung said: “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Or maybe not.
Every half hour during the business day, WCBS Radio reports on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It got back up to 8500 again recently.
I suppose there are some people who could use that information. But they are not listening to WCBS Radio, and if they are, they’re probably not in a position to do anything with the news.
I listen to that station for the traffic reports. Now that I work so close to home, hearing how everyone else is suffering cheers me up, a little bit every ten minutes. It makes up for years of being stuck in that traffic myself.
What the stock market does today says little about the health of the economy. Trying to draw conclusions from it every half hour will cause unnecessary stress. And basing your retirement on what happens to the stock market right now is not healthy.
Other vital signs that may be more informative include the unemployment rate, or the price of oil.
But reading these correctly is very hard. Does the slowdown in job losses mean the economy is starting to recover? Or are we simply running out of people to lay off?
There are about 2.5 million more people out of work now than the government predicted there would be.
Unemployment is a lagging indicator. It is usually one of the last things to improve when a recession ends.
Some people say that the stimulus has failed. But it may be that the economy is sicker than we thought.
David Leonhardt, writing in the NY Times, described it in medical terms: “The patient is not as sick as he would have been without the medicine he received. But he is a lot sicker than the doctors realized when they prescribed it.”
It looks like whatever we caught last fall is still making us sick.
There are other ways to measure our situation. The NY Times reported on several trends that go along with a bad economy. These include longer and slower songs, longer skirts, and a rise in laxative sales. Traffic fatalities go down when people drive less, which they do when they’re not working, or in the bathroom.
But the data gets confusing. People struggling to make ends meet cut smoking and drinking, becoming healthier. At the same time the stress and anxiety of being out of work drive others to drink more, and suicide rates go up.
Kiplinger.com has its own list of quirky economic indicators. My favorite: in a recession, sales of expensive handbags and luggage drop. As a result, the alligator population grows.
Starbucks has been hurting lately; people are giving up on gourmet coffee. No wonder everyone is so unhappy. If we keep going this way, nationwide caffeine withdrawal is going to turn this recession into another great depression.