@Frank Apisa,
Re hospitals other than VA - I've been involved in several.
I started at St. John's in Santa Monica (well regarded place then and now, but then it was small). That was my sixteenth birthday, they hired me to take minifilm xrays, after school and weekends. Yes, I wore a lead cloak, while every patient admitted got snapped in a reach to find tuberculosis. I was also, some time later, part of a survey ok'd by the hospital re how useful that all was. It wasn't. But I spent a lot of hours in med records as the researcher. I was still a child in many ways, but an odd child very interested in med history back then.
The head of radiology dictated the film observations to me and so taught me a lot and I wrote it all up, and also looked all the words up, starting my own dictionary in off minutes. I also taught myself to do this left handed when bored. Not good, my left handed writing.
Worked in that hospital seven years, but also worked for an internist as a helper for a couple of years after school. I handled the room, the waiting patients, the pill dispensing, the ekgs... in the hours I was there. My first ekg was on a nun. Picture me and her. Sometimes the phone, which I'd started at too, but usually if I answered I was phone rescue.
UCLA, well described here, many years, I understand a lot about the research and clinic parts.
Also as a patient with wild eye problems, at Jules Stein eye clinic. The resident who first tested me scoffed, and then stopped scoffing (at one point I was tested for syphilis and I showed up 1+. That was a fluoroscopy test so I challenged (I used to do those) and the head of infectious diseases told me what to tell the resident to ask for better testing. Negative.
Anyway, yes, RP.
Back then, as a clinic patient, one day I had something like seventeen people in the room wanting to look at my eyes.
Breast cancer - a conjunction of help from my gyno, the St. John's BC center, and a well regarded surgeon in where I was newly living, northern california.
Lots of stuff, pretty much good. The well regarded surgeon... was actually nationally well regarded. I doubt she is practicing now, but I bet she is still writing.
Eye surgeries. I've had six. One good guy, the one here in Abq. I'd be in love except I could be his mother.
Ambulance after showing up at an urgent care place.
The deal with that is that they tested me up the wazoo for untold amounts of money and creepy stuff for me (I felt fine, but I had to be led to the bathroom for five days). Turned out what I thought it was, the bp pill made me faint. Thousands of dollars, that were not charged to me but medicare and medicaid.
Past my own history, I've read re med history off and on for many decades. But on my own, I've watched and read (please read Atul Gawande, I'll throw in here).
Don't ******* lecture me or EdgarB, Frank.
