Lake County, IL Health Department doctors should probably be avoided, in my experience.

I went to the Health Department in Lake County, Illinois to try to manage my high blood pressure because I felt like I was going to pop. That was last year.

The “doctor” at the Lake County Health Department told me to stop eating salt and that she wouldn’t prescribe any medications.

Salt makes almost no difference to my blood pressure, but they don’t want to hear it. You’re wasting your money trying to use a Federally Qualified Community Health Center to save money, but you’re better off going to see a private practice doctor instead.

I ended up suffering through high blood pressure for months while doing my research to choose a different doctor to see, and I’m now a patient at Vista Physicians Group.

My doctor at Vista prescribed me medication on my first visit and I started noticing a huge improvement in how I felt and my blood pressure by the third day.

Today, my blood pressure is totally normal, and she even found me a medication (Irbesartan) that is not causing any side effects, and controls my blood pressure at the lowest dosage, saving me from the risks of Stage 1 Hypertension. (On the high side of that even, and sometimes lower side of Stage 2.)

The Health Department doctors seem to like whatever propaganda has gone into style in the medical community, because I’m not the only patient I know who has been subjected to what’s should be considered malpractice.

(“Oh you probably won’t have a stroke…..today!” is their basic attitude at the LCHD. Just go home and feel like you’re gonna pop, until you do! “I’ve seen patients with higher blood pressure than you!”)

I say that my opinion is the Health Department is bordering on malpractice because malpractice is generally defined as not giving patients the current accepted minimum standard of care. So, in my opinion, this fits the description.

Most of the staff are extremely condescending and have the bedside manner of a tarantula.

In addition to ignoring my high blood pressure at the clinic in Round Lake Beach and forcing me to go “Welp, that was a waste of money.” and find a doctor at Vista who would treat it, they put my spouse on high dose cholesterol medication and then ignored the patient when he said he was having muscle pains and memory loss.

I went to the doctor there and explained that his total cholesterol was ridiculously low and I wanted his dosage cut in half. The doctor laughed at me and said “Statins don’t do any of those things.”. Oh really?

Because on the AstraZeneca website for Crestor, it says “all statins” can cause muscle aches and pains, which can be the symptoms of the statin drug causing muscle damage, and that “people taking Crestor and other statins sometimes report memory loss and confusion”. It’s all on crestor.com, which is from the drug company, but what do I know, right?

Then they switch him to a different doctor shortly thereafter, and they won’t tell us why that other one is gone, only that they “aren’t allowed to talk about it”.

I got fed up with that idiot and bought him a pill cutter and started cutting his statin drug in half, and then when he told the new doctor what we were doing anyway, she started prescribing the lower dose, and his cholesterol level is excellent on the lower dose and the side effects cleared up. All it took was a little medical mutiny. 😛

It seems for the most part, the Lake County Health Department gets really bad doctors and they completely ignore the patient’s concerns and totally dismiss the concerns of them and their family members. I’d really love to know what the story is behind that last doctor “no longer being with us”, but I doubt I ever will. Seemed totally incompetent to me.

My doctor at Vista recently told me that my cholesterol was high enough that I should consider a statin drug. I told her that I had been on Crestor previously. She was about to prescribe 10 mg, but I talked her down to 5 mg.

The NIH (which is a reliable source for drug studies) showed that 5 mg Crestor tends to lower LDL-C by 45% on average, compared with the 10 mg dose at 48%.

45% is already a drastic reduction, and more than most people really need, but the drug companies tell doctors to start patients out on 10 mg, even knowing that the vast majority don’t need it and it’s more likely to cause side effects that are not worth the small additional benefit in “bad cholesterol” reduction.

You really do have to be your own advocate.

When Crestor was a blockbuster cholesterol drug (5 mg reduces cholesterol by slightly more than the 20 mg dose of Lipitor) in the early 2000s, there was talk among doctors and the FDA about whether it was too dangerous to use, because most of the patients they put on Crestor got 10 or 20 mg and had significant unwanted reactions to it, but some doctors who were more astute noted that since nearly the entire benefit of the drug at 10 mg or even 20 could be had at 5 mg, they might try starting more patients at the 5 mg dose.

There are extremists on both sides of the medical divide. There are people like my mom who won’t take their medications or get their vaccines, with rare exceptions, and put themselves in too much risk from that, and there are people who go into the doctor’s office and end up on twice as many medications and double the dose that they need to be on, and they can end up in danger from the medication as much or more than the disease.

Heart disease, stroke, and kidney damage are largely preventable and no laughing matter. For God’s sake, take your medicine, but also watch how much they put you on. It’s better to start low and have them observe you than to get twice what you need and have a doctor that laughs when you say you’re having side effects.