So, since my appointment with the specialist he sent me to have an upper endoscopy and an MRI. I have had both of these things.

Yesterday, I call to follow up. I hate telephone voice menus and so I just keep hitting buttons until a human answers. She transfers me to appointments. I tell the appointment lady that I am a patient of Dr. G and I have had an upper endoscopy and an MRI and that I am calling to follow up and probably make an appointment. So she says to me that the next appointment is JANUARY 13th. I said I was sorry to sound shocked but he sent me on all these tests to find out if I needed any surgery and I couldn't believe that he wouldn't want to see me for a month! She is obviously trained to be non-confrontational so she just transferred me to the doctor's Medical Assistant. I left her a message.

Later, she called me back and said that the doctor wanted me to come in for more blood work! And that he had diagnosed it as Pancreatitis. Well, I had two questions for that: what more blood work did they really need to do that they couldn't or didn't do the FIRST time they took my blood TWO weeks ago. AND, I am certainly not a doctor but the limited research I have done tells me that Pancreatitis is *caused* by something. So what is causing it and what do we do to treat it and stop it???

She called me back and said since she wasn't the doctor she couldn't answer my second question but to the first, he wanted to test me to make sure I didn't have "Autoimmune Pancreatitis" but that it was "highly unlikely" that I did. And she said that a follow up appointment in January was just fine.

I hate the medical care process. Let me get political for just a moment: I really don't think that socialized medicine will solve this problem in any way. It may, in my humble opinion, make it worse. </politics>