One of the benefits of being a doctor is getting free medical advice from other doctors. That's right folks. If you can't afford to go to the free clinics your community has set up in town, you can always get a medical school education, spend $150,000 in tuition and lose a decade of your youth studying the medulla oblongata just to hang out in the doctors' lounge to watch You Tube videos like Robert De Niro's Funny Terrorist Names SNL skit while getting free orthopaedic medical advice about painful shoulders and posterior labral tears.
You see, I've been experiencing quit a bit of shoulder pain for the last few months. I think it started this summer when Mrs Happy and I took organized classes at the local full service gym. I'm pretty sure I injured my shoulder sometime between my first ever spinning class, toning class, circuit class and pilates class.
But have no fear. Now that I'm a doctor, I get free medical advice by hanging out in the doctors' lounge. That's the real benefit of going to medical school. It's easy access to all the free medical advice you could ever want. Back in August, I discovered first hand how expensive hospital based care could be when I started a quest on how to find the real cost of hospital and doctor charges.
I never followed through and figured either my shoulder would get better or I'd need bloodless surgery. With Mrs Happy pregnant and all the associated delivery costs coming n 2011, I decided to do a little HSA deductible stacking and wait for getting an orthopaedic consultation, MRI and possible surgery in 2011 when 100% of all charges would be paid by my insurance without any out of pocket expenses on my part. That's FREE=MORE at its finest and a side effect of a high deductible plan.
Then it hit me. Maybe I could get the ball rolling with some free medical advice. Where does a doctor go to find other doctors? Why, the doctors' lounge, of course. So I decided to hang out in the doctors' lounge where all the R.A.P.E.R.S hang out and wait for an orthopod to show up. Wouldn't you know it. It didn't take long. There he was. The go to shoulder guy. So I pimped him for some free medical advice. He did a few maneuvers with my shoulder and then told me he thought I had some posterior instability of my shoulders, probably congenital and a rare infraspinatus strain or partial tear and or a labral tear as well.
I asked him if it was a surgical issue and he said no. Mrs Happy was happy about that. He suggested an MRI and physical therapy and gave me the name of a good reference right down the hospital from where I work. He gave me the name of an outpatient radiology center that charges $750 cash for T3 MRI. Much cheaper than the $5,000 he said my hospital would charge.
I suggested not doing the MRI and just starting with physical therapy, if an MRI was unlikely to change the management plan at this point. He agreed.
A big thank you goes out to the orthopaedic surgeon who gave me free medical advice. I think I'll start my physicial therapy January 1st, 2011 when it won't cost me a dime. Heck, this free advice has already cost me $100,000 in student loans. And in retrospect, I realize I could have gone to nursing school instead and become a nurse practitioner or a surgical tech and still gain access to the doctors' lounge where free food and free medical advice and occasional gripes about ObamaCare flow freely.
