Michelle Martin

Doctor who?

October 30, 2024

When I asked my mother how one of her friends was doing recently, she said the friend was “doctoring.”

The friend has several health problems, as many people in their late 70s do, most of them difficult and painful and annoying, but not immediately life threatening. They’ve certainly impacted her quality of life, though.

But so has the endless round of doctor appointments, tests, screenings, etc. Somehow, especially for older adults, going to the doctor can start to seem like almost a full-time job.

I’m not there yet, but as a middle-aged adult with a chronic health condition and a minor child still at home, medical stuff still takes a lot of time. I once figured that if I met all of my doctors’ recommendations for tests and visits, and the recommended visits for all my kids, and threw dental and eye doctor visits in as well, I would be at the doctor for myself or someone in my care at least once a week, all year long.

Maybe it usually falls to mothers to coordinate care for their kids because they get used to having to coordinate frequent and sometimes conflicting appointments during pregnancy; at the end of my last pregnancy, I was being seen every other day.

Note that none of this is to complain about our doctors; they seem to me to be wise and conscientious and only wanting to help, and modern medicine offers them lots of ways to help keep us healthy. It would be nice to come up with a system that made scheduling appointments all on the same day easier, I suppose, but maybe that’s a pipe dream.

It says something about how important our health is. Our bodies — as our entire lives — are gifts from God and it’s our responsibility to take care of them, and to teach our children to do the same. Some of it is easy to figure out, common sense advice that St. Luke the physician probably would have given his patients: Eat good food, get good sleep, drink enough water, get enough exercise. Maybe not the last item; I don’t think a sedentary lifestyle was much of a problem in the first century. Workers there were not going from the couch to the car to the office chair.

Other things would have been beyond St. Luke’s wildest dreams: antibiotics prescribed for me after a root canal last month; insulin that allows me to metabolize food; even imaging technology that allows doctors to see what’s going on inside a body.

No wonder so many of Jesus’ miracles involved healing physical ailments.

I don’t expect any miracle cures for me and my loved ones; I’m pretty sure that God expects us all to use the tools he’s given us, including modern medicine. So I will go on being thankful for it, even if I do get annoyed with all the “doctoring.”

Topics:

  • family life

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