Doctor paperwork out of control

Doctor appointment forms — designed to make sure you don’t get a chance to notice the age of the magazines in the waiting room.

Anyone who has ever been to a doctor’s office knows the drill. The first thing they do is ask for your insurance and ID cards, then your credit card. If those all check out as current and the co-pay goes through you receive the clipboard of death.

It is rare to see less than five pages of forms to fill out on that clipboard. Half of them have been re-photocopied in thousands of batches since the law requiring that form went into effect in 1989.

Somewhere in that paperwork will be some questions that might really matter. What medicines are you taking? What medical conditions do you have? What surgeries have you had and when? What diseases did your family have?

Those questions can take a good bit of time when you’re my age and have an ever-growing list of medicines and medical history. I’ve put a lot of that down on a cheat sheet in the notes section of my cell phone. All I have to remember is my phone’s lock code since it doesn’t always recognize my face (either the wrinkles are getting deeper or might be the lack of glasses after my cataract surgery).

Some doctors, like the one I’m seeing next week, take things a little overboard by sending you the paperwork ahead of time in the mail. It was so many pages that it took extra postage to send the thing back.

It was lengthy, but it wasn’t too clear. I got stopped on the very first blank. It was “Prefix,” followed by “Name” and then “Suffix.” I had never seen that on a doctor’s form before. After glancing down the page at some of the weirdnesses contained just on the front page I suddenly lost interest in filling this thing out. I read a few things to my wife to make my case then went back to the top and began testing out my answers on my wife.

She didn’t like me putting HM for “His Majesty” on the prefix blank. She didn’t like my suffix of DBS either. I’ll just let you figure that one out yourself.

I went ahead and filled it out without being silly. But I swear, if they hand me a clipboard at the office I won’t be responsible for what I might do.

It’s obvious the doctor never looks at the stuff you put down on those forms because he asks you all the same questions — every time you go to see that doctor. I guess the doctor figures because he has an MD behind his name and I only have a DBS behind mine he can get away with it. Little does he know, “I’m mad and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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