Physician in a post-pentium period
ASIDE from an ancient fax machine and landline telephone, there isn’t much technology in the office of physician Anna Konopka, 84.
Instead, her patients’ records are tucked into two file cabinets, which sit in a tiny office next door to her 160-year-old clapboard house in North Hampshire in the US.
Records are meticulously handwritten, she told reporters after the state’s Board of Medicine revoked her medical licence on the grounds of insufficient monitoring of drug prescriptions.
Ms Konopka secretly suspected that it was the lack of a computer in her office that did her in.
She pointed out with some justification that she did possess a typewriter which admittedly didn’t work but it wasn’t her fault that its parts had been discontinued.
Medicine in the United States had become increasingly regulated and more doctors are expected to keep records electronically. Even so, the aged physician still got at least 25 patients a week not least because she charged a flat US$50 per visit diagnosing anything from angina to arthritis.
Alas, poor Ms K. The former Dr Konopka said she felt forced to surrender her medical licence in September after New Hampshire Board of Medicine officials challenged her record-keeping, prescribing practices and medical decision-making, according to court documents.
Konopka said she wonders if her licence was in part taken away because of her inability and unwillingness to use technology to diagnose her patients or log her patients’ prescriptions as part of New Hampshire’s mandatory electronic drug monitoring program.
Ms K embodied the American Dream, emigrating from Russia and working her way through medical school because she’d heard that one still got paid whether or not one killed the disease or the patient. The Hippocratic Oath may have commanded “Above all, do not harm” but all doctors comforted themselves with the notion that their mistakes would be buried.
But you could not blame the embittered, former physician. She was deeply mistrustful of computers because she knew it made very fast, very accurate mistakes. She felt that the Internet was the Antichrist and Bill Gates, a hound from hell.
Just take his Windows and anyone could see that it was just another pane in the glass.
In the US, she had become a God-fearing, upright woman who coveted neither her neighbour’s husband nor his Pentium. Instead, she religiously eschewed technology in any shape or form on the grounds that the Bible made no mention of any Gates except those of hell.
At the ripe old age of 70, when the candles began costing more than her cake, she relented on the urging of her doctor friends. And she tried. The Lord knows that she tried.
Alas, unsuccessfully. The hound Bill must have designed his next PC specifically for her because it made life very difficult.
She was going on swimmingly until the screen hung. Then a command flickered on screen. It advised the bewildered physician to enter any 11-digit prime number to continue. Totally out of her depth, she tried various combinations with no success. Finally, the face of the smiling hound Bill swam onscreen.
“Having trouble?” he inquired kindly. “Try smashing your forehead against the keyboard. It works great for me.”
Numerous concussions later, she finally gave up altogether one fateful day. She had got stuck again and the computer advised: “Press any key to... no, no, no, NOT THAT KEY!”
The city fined her for heaving her computer out of her third storey window.