Peter Foster
Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.
Don't visit the doctor in America. You might get cancer
Like a large proportion of the male half of our species, I have always visited the doctor as a matter of absolute last resort.
I can’t bear all that undignified poking and prodding, and the taking down of biometric data accompanied by infuriatingly inconclusive hemming and hawing, which always begs the question: “Good news or bad, Doc? Will I live, or die? Is it cancer or the all-clear?”
After more than a year living in the United States, I can report that America’s health care system has done nothing to soothe my anxieties. Quite the reverse, in fact.
This week there has been debate about whether the implementation of ObamaCare will see overall costs in the US system rise or fall – they’ve been falling in the last couple of years, but no one is quite sure why – but from my experience, they can only go one way. Up.
When we moved to Washington from Beijing at short notice, I presented myself (reluctantly) to the doctor complaining of persistent headaches. I speculated it might be due to an impacted wisdom tooth, stress or perhaps an ear infection.
After ten minutes poking, prodding and peering into my ear, the doctor announced she could find nothing obvious and was immediately dispatching me for a CT-Scan of my head, to be taken in the next 48 hours.
Gulp. That could only mean one thing. Was she serious? “It’s just something we have to rule out,” she replied, sounding positively funereal.
Of course, after five days wondering if I was walking about with a brain tumour in my head, the results of the scan came back all-clear.
I ran this past an NHS doctor friend of mine who laughed out loud. I had had no other symptoms to suggest a tumour – no dizziness, nausea, blackouts, blurred vision, slurred speech, forgetfulness – and the scan was, at the very least, an example of extreme overcaution.
I revisit this episode because these last two weeks, I have been laid up with a slipped disc in my back, and yesterday, in a haze of pain, finally admitted defeat and went to see the doctor again.
Cue more poking and prodding, a prescription for multiple drugs that make you feel like there was no need to legalise marijuana and – just for good measure – yet another cancer scare.
Inspecting my back the doctor has spied a mole which, as far as I know has always been present, but the doc now wants to take samples from and have biopsied “just as a precaution”. It is, apparently, a little dark.
I feel torn at this point. Is that doctor about to save my life, or just burden America’s already bloated health care system (at 17pc of GDP the US already spends double every developed nation) with yet more with unnecessary costs?
Only one way to find out, now the spectre has been raised: go and have those expensive tests done.
Which means one thing is certain. The US health care industry (for that is what it is) will continue to thrive even if – God forbid – I do not.
