Doctors And CA MRSA
I have read many horror stories of the ignorant doctors people encounter searching for help with CA MRSA but today was my own personal experience other than taking my daughter to the ER for her first boils and getting them diagnosed as spider bites. I didn’t actually see a doctor because my doctor left that clinic so I’ve since been seeing a PA there. She told me that she wouldn’t do a nose swab culture on me because there was no treatment to give me if it was positive until I actually broke out in boils, which has to be false, because part of the Netherlands plan to eradicate MRSA is that hospital staff workers that test positive have to stay home until they test negative. The PA said that couldn’t be true because she was sure that all health care professionals would test positive and that it wasn’t that big a deal because no one died from it or anything! I begged to differ and told her that, on the contrary, I read every day about people and sometimes whole families dying from CA MRSA. Her response to that was a slight eye roll and a flat Oh. Really. She went on to say that 90% of the population tests positive and it is no big deal especially since you have to get the MRSA germs directly in a cut or other opening in the skin to catch it. At this point I stopped arguing and just listened to her go on about how some CA MRSA was caused from bug and spider bites. (False. They are just misdiagnosed as such according to most respectable sources.) I wrote of the experience briefly in MRSA Survival in Adaptation and got the responses I expected as well as the advice to go straight to a Disease Control Specialist next time. PA or Physician, doesn’t matter, at the Jenny Edmundson Clinic in Council Bluffs they all do and say the same things as they decide is fit and stick pretty close together. It is so sad for all of us who need to find real help. I don’t think that she was downplaying the disease to avoid hysteria like some might be. I believe she really believes her own story without doubt and I bet she doesn’t even look it up to see if I could have been right about anything. That’s the problem with those who think they know everything. They don’t/can’t learn. If anyone just sees this entry please note that everything the PA said to me is absolutely false. I still get a twinge of doubt about the spider bite thing just because there are so many people who blame the brown recluse spider but I’ve seen fresh MRSA boils and I looked up brown recluse spider bites on the internet and they don’t look the same. The spider bites have two tiny fang marks in the center and the boils my daughter had one each although some of them later had multiple heads. I read about one someone had that had thirteen heads! Even when we first believed the doctor who told us my daughter had spider bites I thought it odd that they would bite her four times on the buttocks and no where else. No, spider bites are spider bites and MRSA is MRSA even if people try to say the spiders are carrying the MRSA. I can and will find someone to test me, and to treat me if I test positive as a carrier since I have had very close contact, I didn’t even wear gloves when draining what I first thought were spider bites! Plus I have several small grandchildren that I would HATE to pass it on to by touching my nose and touching them or the baby sometimes will stick his little fingers up your nose if you don’t watch it! I hope to soon be writing about a successful trip to the doctor.
Posted in A Mother's Story
April 10th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Sorry to say, but most of what you say is unfortunately accurate. Please don’t think that the entire medical establishment is callous or ignorant. The problem is mostly due to the fact that the current product of sixty years of evolution( you bushies can stop reading now) is a ferocious people eating microbe the likes of which we never saw or heard about in med school. Doctors tend to be very set in their ways and don’t want to start second guessing themselves when what they see conflicts with what they learned in school. The problem is even worse with PAs because their natural insecurities born of playing the role when they know they don’t have the same training cause them to be even more dogmatic in their refusal to think outside the accepted box. There are literally thousands of strains of MRSA, all of which act a little different, especially in their response to antibiotics. The one characteristic they all share is that they will be worse tomorrow than they are today. There is no hopeful antibiotic on the horizon. I urge you to read about the promise of phage therapy. Phages are viruses which are specific for attacking and killing a particular strain of bacteria. Their natural enemy is probably our only hope of surviving this doomsday bacteria. Drug companies aren’t going to do the research because they probably won’t be able to patent a living organism which occurs naturally, so they won’t invest the money. As for the Federal Government, don’t hold your breath. Bush refuses to recognize the existence of the scientific process. If you know anyone who will still admit voting for him, grab them and shake them real hard.
April 13th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Thank you for the tip on Phage therapy. I had heard of it but had no idea what it was called. I’ll finance some of my own research if I have to! And I would like to especially thank you being a busy MD for responding to my blog. I am curious what of what I wrote might be inaccurate so I don’t pass along false information ~ there is enough of that out here!! Thank you very much again for your input and I will be less harsh about the doctors I talk to remembering you.