The following is an exchange between a friend and myself, talking about her health issues and my response. It's about the current state of health care in the USA.

My friend:
I've been sorting things out with this health situation. But I believe I now may have a good set up for getting better. ? This cardiologist I feel knows how to treat someone like me. I need to know exactly how things work. And he has explained my heart and my whole situation and why I ended up back in the hospital for the second time this year for the same problem only it got worse. The doctors I was using did not have my best interest in there work towards me. I hate to tell you they were using me to try out a medication that my body didn't want and it kept giving me illness and they just treat it with an antibiotic and do nothing more. And it kept coming back month after month. It has been very dangerous for me. But they were making money off of it so that s how they left it. And once I figured it out, I knew what I had to do and that s what I m working through now. I know that it seemed like I was just pushing things aside, but I had to take my own health concerns first and handle them and that's what I'm doing. But now I need to see if the new medications will do what the doctors n myself are hoping.

My response:

The type of doctors you describe is all too numerous, and they don't care for the patient. They are quite different from the doctors we knew as children who did home visits.
Doctors today, at least in America, no longer take the Hippocratic Oath, and that oath is not required by most modern medical schools. The oath involves a clause in which the physician promises not to give to a woman any substance that will cause an abortion. But the symbol of modern medicine is the Caduceus, which is a snake coiled around a staff.
It has been pointed out by people that this symbol resembles the dollar sign, something the modern medical profession finds more endearing than "I will do no harm", a phrase that has been removed from the original oath. The phrase appeared as this: "I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgement, and I will do no harm or injustice to them." Implicitly, it means not to use a patient as a guinea pig. The one thing the oath did not explicitly state was that physicians must treat patients regardless of their ability to pay; in ancient times, payment for medical treatment was taken for granted. I'm sure this makes most physicians happy. But when I was sick as a child, the doctor visited, and my parents gave him $3, and if they didn't have it, the doctor didn't sue them.
As I said, my thoughts are with you. I wish you well. Please keep me informed about what's happening.
Affectionately,
Shlomoh