How to Be a Patient and Live to Tell the Tale!: A Survival Guide for Today's Modern Medical Maze (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781456546779)

Raymond C. Andrews is an American born physician who graduated from the University of Bologna Medical School in Italy in 1970. After training in general surgery, neurosurgery, and aerospace medicine, he accepted the position as an emergency room director in a New Jersey hospital. In the late 1970s he entered private practice in California and later wrote a popular series of articles on health care for the Bakersfield Californian. Other articles and comments of his have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Bergen Record, and Private Practice. While in practice he developed "Drop-in-Laboratory Services" to make access to medical care easier and less costly for the migrant workers that comprised a large portion of his patients. Lured back to Italy by medieval castles and the opera at La Scala in 1984, Dr. Andrews worked ten years for the state health system. He was the first physician to participate in the then newly established Italian emergency hot-line system. After twenty-five years of medical practice on two continents, and with the regrettable certainty that patient care has taken a back seat to bureaucracy and to the questionable tactics of some of his colleagues both here and abroad, in 1995 he accepted a position with the United States Public Health Service and was a director of a Navajo clinic on their reservation in northeastern Arizona. He was also director of the clinic's Emergency Medical Services, and a director of the National Native American Emergency Medical Services Association. Dr. Andrews is presently retired and passes his time writing, building model ships, and driving his modified Jeep and camper off-road in the Arizona desert with his wife, Jennifer.