I am a type1 Diabetic.. So, it is pretty important for me to have a reasonably good relationship with my Endo. For the last 18 months I have been pretty much running on auto pilot while taking part in a fairly big drug study for Lilly. I figured there would be no problem as my endo was one of the doctors on the study, the facility is even an extension of the clinic I go to.. Its even just downstairs. But, last fall I had sort of noticed that my usual endo was not really around and I was only ever seeing the other guy. Again, I was running on autopilot so I didn't really think too much about it. Now, as part of the study, I was not on the test insulin this time ( I was a control ) but, Lilly provided 100% of everything. Every 3 months I would haul home a crate of insulin pens, tips, test strips, glucose tabs, sharps containers.. Pretty much any supply I could imagine needing, and some that I didnt.. Yesterday, the study ended so I knew I would be needing to update my actual scripts and stop at the pharmacy. This is when I discovered a few things. First, apparently last fall my regular Endo suddenly retired. Apparently, it was a very sudden retirement.. Odd since he is probably in his mid 50's and _very_ damm good at his job.. While I had been thinking that the health care act was causing retirements, I had never actually thought that it would hit me so fast. As it turns out this is a huge problem now since< apparently it is against the law out here to write an insulin script if the doctor has not actually seen me in the last 12 months. So, now I need a new endo and to top it off the clock is ticking as my emergency supply drains away.. The good news for me is that I have pretty stellar, and mostly unused insurance.. So, I will do my part to help make things more of a mess by using an urgent care to get new scripts. Yes, this might mean that someone with a more immediate issue gets to wait a bit longer.. But at the same time I will only last about 40 hours after the last of the emergency supply runs out. So, I would describe this as a fairly urgent problem.. Of course this whole mess got me thinking back to the days when Insulin was technically an OTC med. In fact for most of my life a bottle on insulin was about 25 bucks and I did not need a script to buy it. The pharmacy folks would occasionally give me crap for not seeing an Endo.. But back in my 20's I did not have insurance as it was way outside of my price range, and I was already pretty good at being a type 1. That all changed with the latest generation in insulins. The FDA has classified them as being too dangerous to be OTC and as it turns out there is a reason. Apparently its the Doctors that don't want us to be able to just go out and buy insulin. They prefer to force us into making an office visit every 6 months so we can see them for about 90 seconds and then get our script updates phoned in by the assistant.

So, my to big lessons on this are that Dr's are in fact going galt.. Also, they were busy cutting their own throats..