hi, dolfinz,
well, looks like you've gotten some excellent responses here. you don't really need my input but when has that ever stopped me from butting in before?
on the records thing, the magic words you want to use are, and i would be very sweet and polite since he is your primary and presumably you want to keep him but he is just dead wrong here (probably an old school ********, would be my guess, having a bad day or showing off for the wife, who the hell knows?), anyway the phrase to use is this: "...you are interfering with my continuity of care...[by refusing to give me photocopies of my own medical records my good man! now kiss my ****
]"
i know this, because unfortunately the same damned thing happened to me when i was trying to get ready to go to denver for my rib resection. dr. annest had asked me to bring just the prior year's medical history with me (apparently he wasn't interested in 28 year's worth of nonsense, who could blame him?
); all my other docs were more than happy to oblige but my now-ex PCP? had to call her office no less than 5 times over a 3-week period to get the damned records. i was getting ****** so i called a friend who is an ivy-league attorney type and he gave me the key to the kingdom (and would have gotten involved if necessary, as i was getting rather desperate at that point as my plane was about to take off...). turns out, to the detriment of her patients her office had been submerged in corporate paperwork because she was about to switch over to the concierge model of care (maybe that's a CA thing, don't know, don't care, who can afford that anyway?) but boy! did i feel personally abandoned at that moment as she took absolutely no interest in the fact that i was about to go under the knife in a different state, surrounded by strangers and i couldn't get so much as a return phone call from her. she'd been my PCP for years, but i had to spring her loose after that stunt.
anyhow, those few words sure did the trick. oh that and i may have said my next call would regrettably be to my attorney if i did not hear back from her office by close of business, since i had been more than patient and this WAS the fifth phone call over an exceedingly long period of time for such a simple request. but "continuity of care" is the legal term for what your good doctor and his lovely wife are messin' with, dolfinz. maybe they are ignorant of the law, but i rather doubt it. drs. have a way of thinking themselves above it all, you know. part of the god compex, i reckon
i don't know that it's any of his concern why you want your own records. it's up to you entirely whether you choose to tell him why you need them, but if it'll smooth things over a little and make this go down a little easier for the old fart you may want to give him some hogwash in that department. totally up to you.
on the other thing, i think that's exactly why the MRI/MRA that collins does over at UCLA is so controversial, or one of the reasons, anyhow. depending on what day of the week a TOS'er is tested, you can get a different result using the same technology - nevermind a different machine across town read by a different radiologist!
so no, in my layman's opinion, anyway, it does not mean that anyone did anything "wrong" and certainly not (unfortunately) that your subclavian compression has resolved itself. i do know from dr. sheldon jordan that bruits can be heard one day and then not the next, and it's all rather mysterious even to highly-trained specialists like him. dr. fred weaver failed to hear my own subclavian bruits, or suspected them to be coming more from my cervical spine rather - he DID hear something; his own resident perceived them to be subclavian, though... so even the experts don't always agree on this.
my understanding is that there are only a handful of places in this country truly set up to test properly and do the MRI/MRA for TOS. LA is one, Denver has it, now Dr. Werner's facility up in Berkley i believe is another, perhaps a city in FLA or maybe TX and that's IT. i wish i knew more about this. i don't recall Boston being mentioned and i got this info from David Campion, my champion in Beverly Hills from New Zealand whom i trust to know these things, dolfinz. we all know how ignorant the medical establishment can be when it comes to TOS.
will any of them ever admit that? oh hell, no! they all say they KNOW what they're doing. but so few do, so very few really, really do.
i wouldn't read anything into it. if it were me, i'd probably ignore or discard the second test as useless; better yet have a TOS specialist write a report about WHY it isn't to be validated so that no one can use it against you later since you do have an ongoing claim. that is exactly what i would do, now that i think about it. with the competition being what it is, you shouldn't have much trouble finding someone to trash it i would think.
plus, it IS wrong. you know that, you live with the compression and you know it's still there! am i right? i'm right, aren't i! OK, send me $1.00. i'm done now...
alison