Diseased With Greed

Judging by local news coverage, you could easily think there’s a medical doctor in town who’s been enabling addicts and loosely managing controlled substance paperwork and practices.

Were you by chance anyone who’s ever worked in the medical environment-here in Fargo or pretty much anywhere, you’d have a list of MDs in your mind who have bad word-of-mouth images out there, among their peers, support staff or patients.

Dr. Rodney Lee is apparently in a fight for his professional life here in Fargo and in North Dakota. The state medical board has temporarily suspended his license. Rapid Care clinic patients are left in the lurch, apparently, for the moment.

Many of them have tried the pain management systems approaches offered by the big medical conglomerates in town. Many of those patients celebrate the fact that Rapid Care provided them some options, some choices, some alternatives to medical treatment.

This writer spent 13 years in the medical community as a vendor of orthopedic implants, systems and technologies. So there is a first-hand knowledge base of the local medical community, and of larger medical systems’ approaches to patient care, cost management, risk reduction, and the like.

A severely blown disk in 2002 resulted in a specialist’s advice to have back surgery. No alternative to the surgery was given.

I opted not to have the operation, underwent multiple MRIs, time-consuming and expensive spinal injections, and physical therapy.

The treatment I chose, together with life-changing approaches to work habits, stress management and prevention, and dietary and physical modifications, resulted in an entirely successful result without an invasive, risky surgery of the spine.

When on a few occasions since, that particular disk bulged out and squeezed the nearby nerve root, it was not the mainstream hospitals I sought out or even wanted.

Alternative approaches including acupuncture, massage therapy, improved hydration, and manageable exercise, coupled with good solid medical assistance and advice from-here goes-Rapid Care, WORKED.

Not once. Multiple times.

Not everyone wants to sit for hours in a waiting room, only to be treated by over-stressed staff with insensitive, condescending attitudes toward patients who are not only paying an arm and a leg for such attentive service, but who are also given options that are formulaic and prohibitively costly.

“Go get an MRI,” (wait several weeks) “and then come back.” A few thousand dollars later, they will suggest surgery. If you are lucky, they will hospitalize you for thousands of dollars daily, and they will then have another surgeon come tell you you need surgery.

There is a message to our community when hundreds or thousands of patients choose not to use mainstream health care providers unless they have to. There is a message to our medical community that they have dissatisfied customers, disenfranchised customers.

Dr. Rodney Lee will perhaps never clear his name even if these charges and accusations fade away in time. Whoever pointed the finger at him and sent the medical Gestapo his way deserves the same scrutiny, every single doctor in their employ.

A cardinal rule in medicine is to do the patient no harm. Medical politics gone awry is as real, as dangerous, as deadly to professional careers as bad medical care can be to a patient in need.

People need help working through momentary or chronic pain. It is truly unfortunate our medical community’s politics has prevented so very many people from getting medical care affordably and rapidly.

Big is not always better. But big certainly has more muscle to flex. Don’t ever underestimate the role money plays in these decisions, not for a moment. If they succeed in discrediting Dr. Rodney Lee, the patients paying his modest fifty-dollar consultation will be forced to pay a hundred or more elsewhere. Someone or something better-connected than Dr. Lee is trying to take over his patient load and practice.

Meanwhile, every patient in town with any complaints about any medical care by any doctor should make it a point to inform the state medical examiners board; every botched surgery, every missed appointment, every incorrectly diagnosed circumstance, every time they gave you sample drugs without a script.

Is there no hope for the little guys anymore when their competitors are monolithic conglomerates?

We’re holding out for hope. And we hope time clears the good name and reputation of Dr. Rodney Lee.