Family physician Dr. Martin “Rocky” Lyons Jr. wants the public to know avoiding the doctor now may result in future problems.
“The slowdown in physician’s offices is directly influenced by the fear of being around someone sick and fear of leaving the house,” Lyons said. “My concern is I have patients who have congestive heart failure and are diabetics. They are getting in dire need of medical attention that you cannot do over the phone.”
Although he said some office visits are needed, he does recommend telemedicine to see patients.
“If you’re coming in for a refill, sure, we can do that by telemedicine,” he said. If you are a low- to moderate-risk, I think that as this hits a peak and starts flattening out, we need to continue to seek medical services.”
Lyons said River Region Family Medicine, where he has practiced for nine years, has recently experienced a decrease in patients and an increase in calls.
“Many are staying away from the medical world completely,” he said. “Our phone calls have increased and our office visits have dropped probably 30% to 40% for our office and more than that for other offices. The major problem is just there are so many stories out there and data points and information and conflicting stories that one does not know what to believe or how to process it.”
He said walk-in patients and increased phone calls make delivering healthcare difficult.
“It does become very difficult to meet the needs of the public when you are having to do more call backs and telemedicine with fewer employees,” he said.
He thinks as time goes on and more medical offices reduce staff it will be challenging for many to gain access to healthcare.
“You’re going to have a lot of people who cannot weather the storm and their offices are going to get smaller due to the lack of business,” he said. “Who are you going to see when this thing does pass? Everybody will cut their employees down by 50%.”
He assured the public the healthcare industry is doing everything it can to ensure staff and patients remain safe from contracting COVID-19.
“We are certainly attempting to keep the work place as safe as possible,” he said. “We have our employees wearing masks; we are doing temperature checks and doing everything we can from our standpoint to curb the spread. It’s just a different time for everybody, I think.”
He believes the number of positive cases for the coronavirus will continue to climb.
“The other thing people need to realize is it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better in the next 10 days to two weeks,” he said. “After that, we have to start getting back to normal life, medically and economically. At some point in time we have to come back to some sort of semblance of a new normal.”
He expects people will be more cognizant of protecting against viruses in the future.
“I think that the social distancing and repeated hand cleaning and wearing protective masks are going to be more mainstream than we think they are today,” Lyons said. “These are some practices that are going to make us a healthier society.”
