By Dr Syriacus Buguzi
Doctor shopping or double doctoring or roaming from doctor to doctor is the practice of a patient requesting care from multiple physicians, often simultaneously, without making efforts to coordinate care or informing the physicians of the multiple caregivers.
Doctor shopping is usually caused by the patient's addiction to, or reliance on certain mediactions or other medical treatment. Some do it because they don't trust their doctors or because they are psychologically fond of that. The victims always have a feeling that they are always sick-even if they are not. So they will end up using much of their income on a series of irrational medical investigations and treatment options.
''Usually the patient will be treated by their regular doctor and be prescribed a drug that is necessary for the legitimate treatment of their current medical condition''
But some patients will then actively seek out other physicians to obtain more of the same medication, often by faking or exaggerating the extent of their true condition, in order to feed their addiction to that drug.
This practice exposes the patient to dangers of overuse of medications because they roam from doctor to doctor and each may prescribe basing on the wrong medical history of the victim of doctor shopping.
The overuse of drugs can have many problems. The most common is for the user to suffer any number of side effects including nausea, headaches, diarrhea, sleepiness and nervousness.
Some of these can actually be worse than the condition the medication is supposed to treat. As you take more drugs, there is also an increased risk of drug interactions.
Drug interactions can be caused by a seemingly innocuous combination of drugs and can result in heart attacks, stroke or even death.
It is important that every doctor you see be given a complete and updated list of all medications you are on including vitamins. Many people do not realize that vitamins can affect certain prescription medicines.
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