Are ophthalmologists thinking "outside the eyeball"?

Perhaps not, if my recent experience is any indication.

A family member was suffering from eye pain whenever she moved her eyeball, so I took her to the Wilmer Eye Institute. After Dr. B examined her, the gist of what he told me was something like this:

Dr. B: Her eyes are fine. I don't see anything wrong.
Me: So if the pain comes back, should she see a doctor or can we safely ignore it?
Dr. B: I can't say that. It depends.
Me: What do you think caused it?
Dr. B: I have no idea.
Me: If a thousand patients like her were to come in with these symptoms, what are the odds that it's a serious problem that needs treatment?
Dr. B: I haven't seen any cases like this--ever--where there was a serious problem.

Dr. B's answers didn't ring true. Like so many other doctors in my experience, he was unwilling to give any type of probabilistic estimate. [Why is that, I wonder? - Ed.] I asked some more questions but eventually gave up trying to elicit anything of use from him.

For the record, we later discovered that my family member had Lyme disease, which apparently can cause eye pain. It was serious, and she did need treatment.

My guess is that Dr. B is a fine doctor within his specialty, recognizing and treating diseases of the eye. But in our case it seems that he was thinking only inside the eyeball. When the symptom was in the eye and the cause was elsewhere, he essentially was implying to us that "It's not my problem". And he didn't seem to be in a mood to think about or discuss what the real problem might be.

Somehow I expected more than that.

What doctors don't know

I went to a birthday party recently where several guests were 50-ish doctors.

Most of what they said I had heard many times before. They grumbled about lawyers and explained that "we went to med school to treat patients, not to spend half our time filling out forms and fighting with insurance adjusters."

But two bits were new to me. First, none of them knew the story of how health insurance came to be tied to employment. Second, none of them seemed to understand how consumers might benefit from knowing prices before walking into a doctor's office.

Amazing.

They really need to learn the basic facts about the system they've been operating in for decades. Especially before opining on how to fix it.

"Googlified health insurance"

Jeff Jarvis makes a rough sketch of the possibilities: finding new ways to align the interests of doctors, patients and insurance companies.

And Jeff thinks doctors don't get it:

At Davos last year, I sat at a table with a bunch of doctors who complained about their patients going to the internet to get what they said was misinformation. They didn’t want the internet to get in the way. They wanted to remain in control. I told them they were looking at this the wrong way. Instead, I said, they should point their patients to what they though were the best resources.