The plusses of today's healthcare - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

A front page story in last week’s Citizen presented an explanation of how hard it is to get proper, convenient health service in small-town Ontario these days.

 

Kelly Buchanan of the Huron Community Health Team told Huron East Council that they had filled one of two vacancies, hiring a doctor originally from Iran to practise in Huron East for at least three years and she would serve Brussels as soon as possible. How things have changed in the medical world!

 

When we moved to Blyth more than 50 years ago, there was one resident doctor - Dr. Richard Street - and two part-time clinics for doctors from Wingham. Eventually, Dr. Street changed to alternative medicine and the clinics both closed.

 

Then a new clinic opened right next door to our old Citizen office on the east side of Blyth’s main street. Since I had no family doctor at the time, I started going to Dr. Rooyakkers at that clinic. Later that clinic closed and I went to his offices in Brussels or Seaforth. He retired and I went to his successor Dr. Gavsie at Seaforth. I just visited him for a check-up a couple of weeks ago.
Over the years it has become so difficult to find doctors ready to serve rural communities that we now have permanent staff trying to recruit them. It’s a major victory when they succeed. Blyth hasn’t had a doctor (or dentist) for years now.

 

How things have changed in the last century. I recently reread Before the Age of Miracles by Dr. William Victor Johnston, born in West Wawanosh and my childhood doctor growing up in Lucknow before he became the first president of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. 

 

In it, he speaks of other doctors practising in Lucknow at the time and tells of  a doctor in Dungannon. He served part-time at Wingham Hospital when it was little more than a shadow of what it is today. Much of the time he made house calls to ill patients throughout the countryside. When I was a student, I had rheumatic fever and, since my family could not afford to pay the medical fees to have me treated in hospital in those days before medicare, Dr. Johnston’s successor, Dr. Corrin, trudged up our snow-blocked lane to visit me weekly.

 

If you look in nearly every town today, you’ll find that the largest and most impressive homes around were built by family doctors, who often had their offices in the home. This was at a time when most local residents had little more than a Grade 8 education, and yet we had a handful of men (they were mostly men back then) who had gone on to finish high school, university and medical school.

 

So we have the strange situation that we have a more educated population than ever in our history and yet fewer doctors. Doctors also don’t make house calls, easing the burden, yet we can’t get doctors to serve rural areas.
But, at the same time we must admit, our medical care has never been better than what we have today. Thanks to research breakthroughs, we no longer have the diseases that killed so many before their time in years past: rheumatic fever, polio, scarlet fever, measles.

 

Except, as things have improved, some people forget what things were like. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, does not believe in vaccination and has been discouraging the practice of vaccinating children. Recently a child in Ontario born prematurely died from measles in part because her mother had not been vaccinated. Apparently six other babies also suffered the disease, but survived.

 

We’ve also had amazing medical breakthroughs. A few years back I received an artificial heart valve, replacing one damaged by the rheumatic fever I suffered when I was a child. Currently I’m recovering from cataract surgery on one eye with a similar surgery on the other eye later this month. At one time - say in Dr. Johnston’s time - I’d have been dead by now if not for the heart surgery. Like so many of my peers who I’ve recently found out also had cataract surgery, my sight would have been badly diminished without the surgery.

 

So it’s hard to judge the true state of our medical care. On one hand, we practically have to beg doctors to practice in rural areas, yet, at the same time, we have better care than ever. Medicine is not as convenient - I had to travel to London for the heart surgery, Kitchener for the cataract surgery - and yet our local hospitals offer a standard of care that would have seemed impossible when I was a child.

 

And thanks to universal medicare, most of the medical treatment we require is free (though we pay higher taxes).

 

So, despite difficulty recruiting doctors, we have so much to be thankful for!