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It took two years and nearly 50 emergency-room visits for Dr. Ardeshir Hashmi to realize he didn’t need to prescribe pills for his 93-year-old patient’s excruciating chest pains. He needed to prescribe ballroom dance.
Ruth—a pseudonym used for privacy—hadn’t always been a frequent flier in the ambulance. But beginning in 2015, a tight, suffocating pressure in her rib cage would leave her shaking, aching, and dialing 911. Every two weeks, she arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital and received what Hashmi, then her geriatrician and now the chair of geriatric innovation at Cleveland Clinic, calls “the million-dollar workup.” It was an endless parade of white coats, stethoscopes, and negative test results. Hashmi was baffled as he talked to Ruth about the pain that had receded long before she arrived at the hospital.
In actuality, that pain had dissipated the minute EMTs arrived at her home. After countless conversations, Hashmi discovered that Ruth’s grandson had left for college right before the vicious chest pains began. She was alone in a dark, empty house, and no one would drive her to the neighborhood dance studio anymore. No one would even notice if she took a tumble down the stairs. And when Ruth remembered that, pain would blossom in her chest in the fluttering crescendo of a panic attack.
No mountain of painkillers and antidepressants could bring her grandson home. But Hashmi could refer her to a geriatric-care manager who would drive her to ballroom dance again, accompany her as she swayed in her chair to jazzy swing, and reconnect her with her love of music and her friends at the community center.
So he did. And her twice-a-month ambulance habit vanished.
Hashmi had, in effect, written Ruth a social prescription, in which a clinician refers a patient to…
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Source : time
