Unless GPs join in the discounting craze, the days of paying self-satisfying visits for minor ailments are over, writes ORNA MULCAHY
THE COLD season has arrived in the office, along with packs of Lemsip, red-rimmed eyes, hacking coughs, sore-looking noses and conspicuous swaddling in pashminas. Hot honey drinks are all the go, and there’s a lot less dashing off to the doctor during lunch hour. Too expensive – €60 or €70 for a visit to find out you have a viral infection for which nothing can be done? No thank you. Another €15 for antibiotics that will have no effect whatsoever? I’ll try some Echinacea instead.
GPs must be feeling the pinch, but where are their special offers, now that discounting is the name of the game? Say three for two on sick children, or buy one consultation, get the next half price.
What about four tests of your choice and the fifth one free? Perhaps the GPs should consider it, if their waiting rooms are looking a little sparse. After all, if the price of so many other services is coming down, why shouldn’t health follow suit?
“We’re not shopkeepers or merchants,” said a consultant friend frostily when I asked her whether doctors should offer deals. “There is no Lidl or Aldi equivalent in the medical profession. If there was, people would really have something to complain to Joe Duffy about.”
Meanwhile, another friend who is married to a doctor took exception to the man who came to light her Aga after it had gone out, ranted about the costs of doctors’ visits at €55 a pop, and charged her almost three times that to set a match to the cooker.
Paying doctors’ and chemists’ bills for the family’s small ailments once made me feel like a top-notch provider.
Frequent “just in case” visits to the surgery with ear, nose, throat and tummy upsets were just another Celtic Tiger perk, delivering a nice warm glow of satisfaction when the inevitable “all-clear” was given.
Then the whole business of check-ups became a lot more expensive. After a while, a GP visit wasn’t enough, not for your Alpha male or female, at any rate. No, instead there was the corporate MOT: a thorough medical going over became the thing. Big bucks were enthusiastically spent – by the company, if you were lucky – on day-long sessions in posh clinics, where one was CT-scanned from head to foot and a battery of often unnecessary tests were performed. After all that, it might emerge that one was suffering from a little bit of stress, but there was a feel-good factor to that too.
Let’s face it, you were no one if you weren’t suffering from stress in the boiling economy of old. Working hard and playing hard took its toll, and the doctor tut-tutted. For the “worried well”, the odd trip to a specialist was a must. It certainly gave me a virtuous kick to have any slight irregularity over-exhaustively investigated and eliminated.
It was a similar kick to the one I got from buying lots of organic fruit and vegetables even if, truth be told, a lot of them ended up on the compost heap.
Now, let me tell you, it’s back to supermarket carrots and spuds and living with the lumps and the bumps, the aches and the coughs.
I’m hoping that a stash of vitamin C and Aspirin in various forms will see us through the winter months, along with large quantities of marmalade (Marie Antoinette’s remedy of choice), and plenty of ventilation rather than central heating.
Boots, the pharmacy chain, is finding that more people are doing likewise, using the chemist counter as a first port of call, rather than going to the doctor.
“Our pharmacy teams are increasingly helping customers with advice on minor ailments and vitamins, as more people become increasingly aware and take responsibility for their own health,” a spokesperson e-mailed me.
Others are simply going online, both to diagnose their complaint and to treat it. A woman I know is being medicated by her daughter, who gets all her drugs online from California, including vitamin C tablets that are so pure they don’t even fizz.
For the common cold, there is an alternative to the doc or drugs. A good night’s sleep is a powerful curative, according to Shakespeare, while findings in the US show that poor sleep and susceptibility to colds go hand in hand.
In a recent study, scientists monitored the sleep patterns of a large group of men and women, and then blasted them with cold viruses.
Those who slept an average of fewer than seven hours a night were three times as likely to get sick as those who averaged at least eight hours.
Not everyone can take to the bed when they feel a cold coming on, The urge now is to battle on, particularly for workers who want to appear indispensable in the downturn. Or who in fact are indispensable, since colleagues have been let go and there’s no one else to do the work.
All one can say is, the wheel will turn. Duvet days will come back into fashion. Meanwhile, pass the Uniflu.