Letter to the Editor - Richard Hester

American Doctors

I guess that not many of us enjoy the thought of having to go to the doctor’s office even though we have become a bit sick and may our old “family remedies” that our grandma used for ages just didn’t get the job done at times. It didn’t cost much to pay for grandma’s remedies but in this day and time, even when we have health insurance, we often find that our health insurance doesn’t quite cover the hole bill and we have to ull out our check book to cover the rest. I wonder if I am the only one who has sometimes grumbled at bit or more than a bit when we have to do this?

I want to tell you a few pertinent facts about our medical professional and the approximate costs of education that it takes to become a medical doctor and a registered nurse but first I want to tell you about how I have seen medicine practiced in a couple of the many countries that I have worked in.

In the Republic of Trinidad which is a very large island just east of Venezuela, I had to take one of my men to the hospital for an emergency operation. I took him into Port of Spain which is the capital city of the Republic of Trinidad. We went to the very best hospital in the country. It was a two story building and I noticed that all of the windows were fully opened and there were no screens on the windows. The double front doors were fully opened.

I turned the man over to the hospital attendants and a doctor and they went immediately to the surgery room with him. About 30 feet down one of the hallways I noticed a gurney with a green sheet on it with a large blood stained area on the sheet. One the floor adjacent to the gurney was a large pool of blood on the floor. Maybe something has just happened and the hospital had not h ad time yet to clean this up.

I spent two hours down by the surgery waiting area to see how my man was doing. He made it alright so I headed back to the front desk to sign papers and as I was walking down the main corridor a dog; yes a dog passed me in the corridor! The gurney was still there with the bloody green sheet and the pool of blood was still on the floor. I saw all of this. This was medicine being practiced in 1979.

In the Republic of Iraq in 1980 I was on a huge job with 6,500 men. They came from countries all over the planet but we did not have a single doctor on that job. We complained many times to the Iraqis, finally they sent us two registered nurses, both were women but we did not get even one doctor! Twentieth century medicine? I wonder.

A man went to see the nurses with a red looking streak up his that was likely blood poisoning from a cut on his arm about two weeks old. They held his arm over a sink and took a scalpel and opened it up to “drain out the poisoning” like we might have done 200 years ago.

In closing this segment I have had foreign nationals tell me on the plane flying me back to Houston, Texas that they had various diseases and they were coming to Houston to be healed. This speaks well of our medical professionals.

To educate an American nurse the cost for their education runs from about $28,000 up to $40,000 depending on just how much education they want.

To educate a medical doctor – get hold of your seat! Basically from $200,000 up t $400,000!

Let us try to grumble less. We have the best doctors on the planet period!

Richard Hester

Semper-Fidelis