New Student Health Record: Fill & Download for Free

Due to a congenital urinary tract malformation, I had multiple urinary tract infections over the years. One day when I was a student at the university, I saw a doctor at the student health center because I felt another coming on. After some lab work, she prescribed Gantrisin, a sulfa drug that was normally prescribed for my infections.After taking the second dose, I began to feel strange. My palms became red and itchy and I began to feel as though I were viewing things through a tunnel. Foolishly, I walked back to the student health center. A woman was putting up a sign saying “Closed” but I decided to knock on the glass door. She took one look at me and opened the door, despite the fact that a staff meeting was scheduled to begin. Thirty seconds or so later I passed out. I was having an anaphylactic reaction to the sulfa drug, and after emergency treatment there, was sent to the hospital.The board-certified urologist at the hospital apparently didn’t read the note I had brought from the doctor at the student health center. “Oh, give her a prescription for sulfa and call someone to pick her up and take her home.” I could not believe what I had just heard! But I felt very tired, too tired to make a fuss; I just wanted to go home.So I refused the prescription—telling the nurse why—and went home. I was very tired. It would have taken more energy than I had to make even a moderate fuss at that point, and I figured that the nurse would find a way to let the doctor know.Fortunately for me, this ended well, and I hope the doctor learned not to make assumptions.Medical care since then has changed a bit.My drug allergies—I subsequently had an anaphylactic reaction to ibuprofen—are now prominently noted in my health record.I use only one pharmacy, so that all of my medications are on file in the same place.I always check with the pharmacist before starting a new prescription medication to be sure that the new Rx will not interact with my existing prescriptions.

The first big one occurred when I was a sophomore in college. I’d get upper abdominal pain, usually Saturday nights after my parents visited. I went to student health a couple times; after giving me pain pills, they said to go to the ER the next time it happened. I went to the ER associated with the university I was attending. I have them my history and the doctor, after palpating my abdomen, said I was just homesick. I actually had gall stones and needed surgery.About six years later, I was in Illinois for grad school. I went to student health regularly for a cough that would not go away. As time went on, I was so tired; I used my limited energy on the classes I was teaching, Intro to Psychology, instead of my own studies. I insisted on a chest X-ray to see what was going on; after a year, they finally did so. They said nothing was wrong and that I was “just a California girl who couldn’t handle Midwest winters.” After two years, I wasn’t making progress towards my MA/PhD, so I was stripped of my tuition waivers and my TA position. I went home to California and my regular doctor. He gave me a steroid shot because he thought it was an allergic cough, like so many I’d had before. The steroid was supposed to treat the cough for three months; after the weekend, the cough was back. I had an X-ray which showed a large mass in the center of my chest. My California cough was actually Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. When my oncologist requested the X-ray done at school, they said they had no records. Being cynical, I’ve always thought that they spotted something that they had missed and made it “go away.”The third time was after I was on a disability retirement. I was having left flank pain. My primary doctor said it sounded like kidney stones and sent me to a urologist. He said he found small stones in my right kidney that could cause pain when passing and a staghorn stone in my left kidney, which he said couldn’t be causing the pain. So he said the left pain was referred pain from my right kidney. After a few laser procedures to blast the right kidney stones, he said that too much scar tissue had formed in both kidneys and that I needed surgery to remove my left kidney. I decided to go to a different urologist — who specialized in kidney surgery (the urologist I had been going to was my father’s who specialized in prostate issues) — for a consultation. The new urologist tried removing part of the left kidney, but eventually had to remove the rest; a stone had blocked the left ureter and killed the kidney. This time they medical community didn’t say my pain was “in my head,” but didn’t trust my self-reported pain levels. I have now been left with chronic pain and a damaged right kidney.TL;DR. Doctors who were to lazy to do proper studies assumed that I — an obese young woman — could not be sick, blaming psych issues.

This originally started as a reply to a comment on a share I did of Ted Kord’s answer, but it kind of spiraled, so I figured I’d just add it as an answer. Here’s the link to the share thread: David Muccigrosso's share of Ted Kord's answer to Why can't the United States have universities at reasonable prices? in Dave's Daily DiscourseIn the general sense, yes, Ted’s first three points were highly relevant, though he also missed another one that is even more relevant to the solution of getting education back down to a reasonable price.Namely, the debt model of education finance is wrong. At the most basic level as a financial instrument, debt requires collateral, also known as being “secured”, because it secures the debt against default. But you can’t secure an education: you can’t reach into someone’s brain and take out the knowledge.This is why student loans are so fucked now: when the banking industry had the inevitable bankruptcy crisis with student loans that couldn’t be secured, they successfully lobbied to have them exempted from bankruptcy proceedings.So, first of all, the best model for privately financing education is probably something like what record companies use - you treat each education as an “equity” investment. Investors would compete to sign students for contracts where they pay a fixed rate of their post-graduation income (~5–10%) for a certain term (5–20 years)*, and the investors would then negotiate with the universities for tuition (thus insulating students from direct price increases, against which they have no market power, by substituting them for large investors who DO have market power against the universities), which they would pay up front. On the back end, the investors would treat the entire portfolio like a record company does its artists: you sign anyone and everyone, and take a loss on most of them, because the percentage you get off the “rock stars” makes all of it back and more. Since you can’t perfectly predict who the rock stars are, you lose out if you don’t sign enough people.* these ranges could be regulated to prevent abuse.And at the end of the day, the students aren’t fucked over by ridiculous monthly payments right after graduation. It benefits the larger economy because they’ll be able to afford things like cars and apartments, instead of living in their parents’ basements.All other issues being equal, this is what a functioning, market-based education finance system looks like.Now, about those other issues.The biggest thing that Ted misses about #2 is that it’s not just price discrimination going on, it’s also that the price has decoupled from the cost.This is one aspect of economics that the classical supply-and-demand model misses out on. Companies regularly price their products not for what the actual supply costs are, but for what the demand curve will bear.We see this in ticket prices: baseball teams, for instance, could fill their stadiums if they wanted, by lowering prices. But in their estimation, properly pricing their lowest-priced seats (probably somewhere around $5 on weekdays) would piss off the season-ticket holders who pay thousands for more-or-less the same experience.In higher education, prices have decoupled from costs because of decades of increased demand. It’s a seller’s market: consumers are competing with each other to buy the “best” educations. And among those consumers, price has come to be seen as a signal of quality, so they compete for the highest-priced offerings.In my aforementioned model, we’d fix this by replacing these decoupled consumers with “re-coupled” investors who are negatively sensitive to price, meaning they don’t view it as a signal of quality, and have the ability to compile actuarial data on each university’s actual performance.Similarly, #3 would largely be fixed by such a model, because there wouldn’t be any need for the government to make loans to poor students. If anything, however, the government could still use its cheap borrowing costs to finance a “public” portfolio of student equity contracts. They’d be guaranteed at cheap, subsidized rates, perhaps with a discount for poor students. And as one of the largest investors in the country, the government could exert some major pressure on universities to keep tuition down. Also, having the government in the market as a direct competitor with strong influence over the baseline of consumer-facing “prices” - IE, rates and terms - would be preferable to distortative direct regulatory interventions like hard legal caps on those rates and terms.Now, #1 is a different beast. Administrative bloat would also be somewhat dampened by the downward pressure those investors could exert, but it’s more than that.Administrative bloat is the “galaxy brain” moment of education costs (galaxy brain being the middle of the classic brain meme chart, not the top): it’s profound, but it’s not the MOST profound.The “universe brain” is when you figure out that the administrators have had plenty of time to assemble what’s essentially an old-school trade guild to protect their whole racket. They’ve commandeered the accreditation system and designed it so that their jobs are self-justifying and self-reinforcing:Why do we need yet another administrator to be the new Dean of Student Health? Because the university has to have a student health center. Why does the university need a student health center? Because accreditation. Why does the accreditation commission require it? Because the members voted to. Who were those members? University administrators.This circular logic applies to basically every aspect of administrative bloat. There isn’t really any innocent logic to justify every university duplicating essential basic services provided by local governments, like hospitals, police, public defenders, tenants’ advocates, etc. It’s just that they get to control those services. Similarly, if a bunch of students are whining for something, it’s easier to create a new $160k/salaried Associate-Vice-Assistant-Dean-of-Whatever for the PR win, and pretend that it’s a super-serious requirement for your accreditation, than it is to weather a storm of bad PR that might drop enrollment.What I’m saying is, the system that creates the bloat is what’s out of control, not just the individual bloaters. The traditional way we combat things like bloat - criticizing individual instances of bloat - ends up with everyone getting up on their usual culture war battle lines, and the bloaters end up winning most of the time while everyone else is duking it out. We pick a million small battles in our universities every single day, and in every battle, a swarm of administrators from across the country comes in and backs the bloaters, assuring the public that, yes, this bloat is necessary, because the accreditation commission says so, and that’s a very serious group of very serious people, don’t you know, so we have to do what they say.We need to go to the source. Attack the commissions. Replace the administrators and their MBAs and Ph.Eds with actual professors who teach things.But it’s also more than that. Universities have built their own social contracts, often segregated from their local communities (which drives “town v gown” divides), because the social contract in those communities, in America, is failing.This is a bigger problem than university administration. It’s a problem of democracy. I don’t want to turn this into my usual harping on voting reform, but it should suffice to note that the way we vote (1) ignores the losers, punishing as much of a plurality as 49.9% as long as they’re on the losing side, and (2) does not allow for flexibility or multiple ideologies, reducing every fight into two sides. This isn’t a recipe for democratic accountability, it’s a recipe for domination and entrenched power.Administrative bloat, municipalities and states that can’t or won’t keep up with the needs of universities or even their own citizens, endless federal-backed student loan limit expansions, the decoupling of price from cost for most educational consumers, and the bad-bordering-on-evil debt model, are examples of that entrenched power. It’s no wonder that we’re stuck with them. I don’t expect the ultimate resolutions to all look like what I think they should; but in a system where voting and power are more directly linked to the people, I expect that they’ll be far more equitable for those people.Now, since you were patient enough to read all the way down here, here’s a picture of a kitty:Cheers!