Recently had a problem with my wife as she was attempting to pass a gallstone.

After telling her that it was pretty close to normal for there to be a lot of pain, she decided to go get a doctor to test her for what the pain was.

She went to a "Doc-In-A-Box" medical clinic locally, and he ran a blood panel, gave her some antibiotics and a vicadin for the pain and told her to go home a sweat it out. There were no x-rays taken at the time, although an ultrasound was given with an "uncomplicated" definition of the situation given to her.

Later, when the pain got worse according to her and she developed some localized shingles, we went to the ER at the local hospital here in Hemet, California.

Immediately, they went for a CAT-scan as they said that there was NO other test that could see what the problem was...and another blood panel was taken.

The ER doctor can running in telling us he needed to transfuse my wife with at least 3-units of whole blood. Her RBC was 3.8 million/µL/cu mm, and that was indicative of severe internal bleeding, so he said.

I asked him where the blood was indicated and he said since she wasn't actually leaking it anywhere it was therefor an occulted blood loss, and that she was dying and needed immediate admission and transfusions.

Of course, we would NOT respond to such treatment. He said that she was dying as she stood and that they had a crash cart waiting for her when she fell at any moment.

We had the RBC from the other doctor's office in our hands, and when we compared the two, she had actually gone up a point on this new test...so his theory was all wrong. He blatantly refused to say that the previous test held any validity and was suspect at best as it wasn't from a "real doctor" anyway, and that he was right and that we had to get her into observation for a few days to see where she was bleeding from.

HLC was called by me, and they told me that the RBC was a lot higher than many patients with serious problems and that the values, although they weren't as high as a teenager or active athlete, were likely in a good and likely safe range...although they offered NO medical advice.

The doctor then told me that we would not get the results of the CAT-scan if we refused to comply with his medical diagnosis.

We walked out.

What amazes me is the cavalier attitude by medical professionals who probably see the dollar signs and just want to increase the census in the building, not necessarily at a benefit to the patients. Even between doctors, there's a certain amount of brick-batting and that doesn't look good for the practice.

The numbers didn't wash well, there was no blood loss, not even occulted, and the need for a transfusion for a gallstone certainly seems out of place under the circumstances. Even the need for a Cat-Scan as a test for the stone was a little out of range too. I think they smelled money and went for it.