[MRM]

I can't recommend Mayo Clinic enough. They follow the integrated health care model, which makes all the difference. It would be unheard of you to fall through the cracks at a Mayo Clinic they way you are now because every doctor is connected with each other. I'm local to Mayo's main campus and we do an executive physical with them yearly. They've caught two issues that don't affect my health today but would have drastically shortened my life if they hadn't found them. Think silent killers.

True story: About ten years ago I was handling a court trial (no jury) in Miami. Since there was no jury, we were able to chat together a bit. When we were chatting one evening, the judge told her remarkable Mayo Clinic story. The judge was married to a very prominent personal injury attorney who had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor a few years earlier. He went to the best doctors in Miami, got second opinions, and everyone told him to go home and put his affairs in order. The guy was less that 50 years old at the time. One of their friends recommended they get reviewed at Mayo Clinic. They didn't think anything would come of it, but since they didn't have anything to lose, they looked into it.

Mayo has a system for taking patients who self-refer. You go on their web site, fill out the right forms, send in some authorizations, and someone sets you up for the appropriate in-person consultation. They got set up for a two day visit. Mayo's strategy is that you're assigned to a specific doctor who is your medical coordinator. He follows you wherever you go. You meet with him for your initial evaluation, then you get sent to the individual specialists, scans and tests as the care coordinator directs. So you bounce around from floor to floor and building to building, each time seeing someone who is expecting you and has read your full file, because they're all in the same system. At the end, you go back to your care coordinator who tells you your treatment plan. So the judge and her husband met with their coordinator who took their medical records and tried to read his scans. The doctor just laughed and said he couldn't use their scans and needed to order good quality scans at Mayo. So for the next two days the judge and her husband traipsed through various departments at Mayo, getting poked, prodded, and scanned.

At the end of the second day they returned to their care coordinator for the final evaluation. They sat down all nervous, expecting to be told to make the most of the time they had left, as the doctor jumped right into his plan as though they already knew what he was talking about. He kept saying things like when you return, next steps, recovery time, and things like that. Eventually they broke in and said excuse me, but are you saying you can operate on the tumor? The doctor looked at them blankly and realized no one had gotten them up to date on the results (in all fairness, that's what he was supposed to be doing). He responded, oh, I though someone told you. Yes, this is totally operable. We just need to schedule you in. Amazed, they asked how this could be, how many operations like this had he done, and why the doctors in Miami thought it was inoperable. The doctor thought for a moment and explained that the tumor the lawyer had was very rare and that most doctors never see one like it, so they didn't know what to do with them. But, of the ones that are diagnosed, they all come to him. He said he did a couple operations like that a week.

So that's what they did. He got operated on as soon as they could schedule him in. He needed to stay in the hospital for chemo or radiation therapy for a month or two, then he had to return to the clinic frequently for more treatments, with declining frequency. It took almost exactly one year, but he completely recovered and even went back to practicing, without any cognitive deficit.

And the guy would have been dead if he hadn't gotten a second opinion at Mayo Clinic. There's a reason why Saudi sheiks fly across the world to visit Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.