How to cope with medical shortfalls

The appearance of the first “medicine person” in the Butterbean family may have occurred back in the days when the Butterbeans’ immediate ancestors moved out to a ranch 15 miles away from the real doctor and when cars weren’t so dependable.
To get to the doctor’s office back then, you had to drive a car that had to be push-started, was liable to get a flat tire on the way there, and was usually out of gas. (My, how times have changed in the Butterbean family.)

After the car was up and on its way, someone had to drive over roads that were either sandy, muddy or washed out. (Walking through snow was reserved for children going to school—three miles uphill both ways.)

Then as now, our family had an impeccable history of becoming sick or maimed only on weekends when doctors go into hiding and it does you no good to drive to town anyway.

Since those days, there has always been at lest one bona fide, bone-wearing shaman among the generations of the Butterbean tribe. Come to think of it, it’s a wonder there isn’t a real doctor in the family. There is no shortage of aspirants.

Through the years, we have been known to consult the family shaman in cases of loose teeth, split fingernails, floor burns, road rashes, sprains, lacerations, nosebleeds, hay fever, dog bites, tick bites, and numerous other accidentally self-inflicted wounds—a fact which has made top executives of our medical insurance companies ever grateful.

Common treatments involved vitamin C, salt water, soap and water, rest in bed, band-aids when they could be located, fishing line, sport tape and elastic wraps.
Which brings us to the question of why do-it-yourself medicine is still practiced in the Butterbean family: neither I nor the insurance company can afford the real kind.
Somewhere between those days when it was impractical to drive to the doctor’s office and now when you will have a hard time paying for the service when you get there, were the days when it did you no good if you did go there.

If you are in my age bracket (usually the highest one), you will remember those days of general antibiotic hysteria when the only way you could get a prescription for an antibiotic was to show proof, be you living or dead, that you had “strep.” No other illness warranted the use of antibiotics. The only way to rule out all other strains of sore throat was to show up at the doctor’s for a throat culture. If it was positive, you were rewarded with antibiotics. If not, you were sent home with an aspirin in your hand.

My friend, who raised her children during the Great American Antibiotic Freeze, took her daughter to the doctor twice, two weeks running, with a sore throat. Each time she was charged the going rate and sent home with a handshake: “Congratulations, your daughter has the non-strep variety of sore throat.”

But my friend was getting smarter. The next time her daughter had a sore throat, she used her own strategy. No, she didn’t visit the family shaman. Instead of making an appointment, then driving to the doctor’s office and waiting in line, she telephoned him and reported that her daughter again had a sore throat and would he please add the usual $35 to her bill while she gave her daughter an aspirin.

In case you were wondering what the family shaman needed fishing line for (besides fishing of course); he has been known to suture his own lacerations for two reasons. He didn’t have strep, and he couldn’t find a band-aid.