Bedside manner

It amazes me that there are doctors out there, practicing "medicine" and interacting with "patients" in a so-called "hospital" or "health care facility" who have little ability to hold a good-natured, pleasant "conversation". Case in point, my endocrinologist at the Tang Center, who I saw today at 9:15 a.m.

I've seen this guy three times since last fall. I'll call him "Dr. G". Each and every time I have gone to see Dr. G., he's more and more terse, shifty, presumptive, and testy. It's almost as though the sundry health issues of Berkeley sorority sisters and demure hipsters have consumed this man's entire soul.

So, my appointment was at 9:15, and being the responsible patient that I always am, I was there at 9:08. I was brought into the examination room where I sat for the next 45 minutes. Those rooms are cold, too. And there's NO good magazines to speak of, just some pamphlets on how to correctly perform a breast self-exam, how to quit smoking, and a colorful poster to look at with all the interesting packages for different brands of birth control.

Quite abruptly, he comes in, asks me some basic, dead-end questions. Then, before I knew what was happening, I was forced to submit to abdominal examination, presumably to look for "enlarged internal organs". Is it me, or is that examination god-awful? And especially when it's performed by someone like Dr. G, it's torture. What a welcome!

Looking back on it, Dr. G's effort today wasn't unforgivable, far from it. He is just so "blah" and eerily robot-like. And not in the endearing C-3PO robot way, either. Where are the articulate, unweary, and otherwise human doctors of Berkeley, CA? I guess my last doc, Dr. Michael Bryan, native of Jamaica, who liked to sing island tunes while examining his patients, was an outlier in an otherwise bereft ocean of personable endocrinologists.