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why do you ask?
Feb. 8th, 2025 09:12 pmI made a doctor's appointment yesterday, and the person in the office asked me a question I didn't expect. (No, I still haven't found a primary care doctor. Still looking.) I found a neurologist connected with MGH who seemed vaguely promising, so I called the neurology clinic desk at MGH. The nice person there arranged for me to have the next-available appointment with a neurologist she thinks might be able to help. I'll let you know in 10 months how it goes.
The person in the neurology clinic really was very helpful in setting up the appointment, and asked all the usual questions about name and address and insurance and emergency contacts and so forth. They had a more extensive form than I expected, either because it's 2025 or because it's such a big hospital.
Some of the questions are recognizably sensible even if I'm not accustomed to them. Am I looking for a second opinion? Am I being treated for this problem currently? Have I been hospitalized overnight in the last 4 weeks? Do I plan to arrive by ambulance?
Then they asked "In what state were you born?" This is not relevant to my health nor to my health insurance. This is not part of my medical records at all! It's on my passport, which I've never needed to show a health care provider or insurance company.
A neurologist once asked me if I'd been born by C-section, but I don't recall him asking where. I suppose it might be relevant to a person's brain chemistry if they had spent early childhood in some spectacularly polluted area. But that's a confluence of place and time, and the place is usually more specific than the whole state. I was born in Michigan, but I left long before the notorious water pollution of Flint. I was even out of state the year half the milk was contaminated.
I vaguely recall hearing that in some states (Texas? Someplace else down south?) there were new rules last year requiring hospitals to ask patients their citizenship status. Could this be that sort of thing? It hardly seems plausible. If Boston's major hospitals closed their doors to everyone who had been born abroad, all the places would collapse.
The person in the neurology clinic really was very helpful in setting up the appointment, and asked all the usual questions about name and address and insurance and emergency contacts and so forth. They had a more extensive form than I expected, either because it's 2025 or because it's such a big hospital.
Some of the questions are recognizably sensible even if I'm not accustomed to them. Am I looking for a second opinion? Am I being treated for this problem currently? Have I been hospitalized overnight in the last 4 weeks? Do I plan to arrive by ambulance?
Then they asked "In what state were you born?" This is not relevant to my health nor to my health insurance. This is not part of my medical records at all! It's on my passport, which I've never needed to show a health care provider or insurance company.
A neurologist once asked me if I'd been born by C-section, but I don't recall him asking where. I suppose it might be relevant to a person's brain chemistry if they had spent early childhood in some spectacularly polluted area. But that's a confluence of place and time, and the place is usually more specific than the whole state. I was born in Michigan, but I left long before the notorious water pollution of Flint. I was even out of state the year half the milk was contaminated.
I vaguely recall hearing that in some states (Texas? Someplace else down south?) there were new rules last year requiring hospitals to ask patients their citizenship status. Could this be that sort of thing? It hardly seems plausible. If Boston's major hospitals closed their doors to everyone who had been born abroad, all the places would collapse.
