The Housecall Doctor

  Every five years or so, the Los Angeles Times discovers the housecall and publishes an article extolling it that doesn’t mention me, the nation’s leading housecall doctor. The latest appeared in 2016. As always, I wrote the reporter to point out his error. To my surprise, he phoned a few days later, interviewed me for half an hour, and wrote another.   You can find it at: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-is-the-house-call-really-dead-20160202-column.html  

  “This is Doctor Oppenheim,” I repeated several times before hanging up. Caller ID identified the Doubletree in Santa Monica, so I phoned to ask if someone had requested a doctor. Someone had. “You answered, but you couldn’t hear me,” said the guest. “So I called the front desk again, and they gave me a different number. Another doctor is coming.” That was upsetting because the Doubletree is a regular. When asked, the guest gave me the 800 number of Hotel Doctors International, a service based in Miami. “How much are they charging?” I asked. “I don’t know. They just asked if I had insurance.” That was a red flag. Many hotel doctor agencies charge spectacular fees and then assure guests that travel insurance will reimburse them. Forewarned of our rapacious medical system, foreign travelers rarely make a fuss – and foreign travel insurance generally pays outrageous fees. But American insurance doesn’t. I told the guest, an American, that my fee was $300 and that he should ca

  “She speaks Spanish. I’m not sure what’s going on, but she needs a doctor.”  The caller was the night manager at the Torrance Marriott. The hotel rarely calls, but I go regularly for crew of LAN, Chilean Airlines. An LAN crewperson who falls ill is supposed to call her supervisor who calls the central office who calls Federal Assist, a travel insurer, who calls Inn House Doctor, a national housecall agency who calls its answering service who then calls me. The guest hadn’t followed the procedure. If I made a housecall at her request, getting paid would be a major hassle.  I phoned the answering service which had no idea what do. I phoned Federal Assist who insisted it wasn’t responsible for arranging visits. I phoned the director of Inn House Doctor to alert him to the problem. Then I waited.  It was 5 a.m. It’s dangerous to make these housecalls before official approval because it may never arrive. But the rush hour was about to begin, and I couldn’t resist. I jumped in my car

  “I have the European plague. I need a doctor.”  “Excuse me?...” “I have the European plague. I need a doctor for the American plague.” “I’m not sure what you mean.” “My child is in the bathroom with the European plague. Can you bring the doctor?” What was he talking about?.... The exchange continued for some time until the light dawned. This was the fourth occasion this has happened in over thirty years and 30,000 phone calls. The guest had phoned the front desk because his electrical devices used European outlets which are different from ours. He needed an “adapter.” The clerk, not listening carefully, had heard “a doctor” and forwarded his call to me. But I was also not listening carefully. It’s human nature to hear what you expect to hear, so I assumed that the caller had a medical problem. I had heard “European plague” when he had said “European plug.” He had not said “my child is in the bathroom” but “my shaver is in the bathroom….”

Here's the story. I began making hotel and housecalls in Los Angeles in 1978. By the 1990s I was doing it full time. Ultimately I made over 18,000, and no one will ever match that because there was little competition in the early days. Today there’s plenty. I began a blog, The Hotel Doctor (thehoteldoctor.blogspot.com) in 2009. I posted regularly and enjoyed a good response until something weird happened. My page views dropped almost to zero; after a few months a post might acquire a dozen clicks. At the same time, cryptic E-mails from the “Google Search Console Team” began arriving. They   had detected “mobile usability issues” or that they were “validating coverage issue fixes” and would inform me when they had finished. I had no idea what was happening. Google has no blog customer service, but I appealed to several support groups and learned that Google apparently had stopped indexing my posts. They had plenty of suggestions for fixing this, many I couldn’t understand, and non