Useless, useless, useless

<p>I have had back problems for about 4 years now that I have been managing with pain medication as needed. The pain has increased in the last 3 months and it has now come to a point where I have such severe pain that I have to take a huge amount of pain medication to just get slight relieve. I also have to take muscle relaxing medication which can be very addictive. I have numbness in my foot and the pain has started going down into my legs. I am a registered nurse and work 12 hour shifts. I am the sole breadwinner in my family. The pain has become so severe that I stumble - because of the pain and because of the numbness. I have fallen several times. I went to see a neurosurgeon who works with an orthopaedic surgeon and after looking at my MRI results decided that I need a lumber spine fusion. Because it is at the L4/L5 level is does not qualify as a PMB condition because in my case there is only pressure on the root nerves - therefore the severe pain - and not on the spinal cord. I requested authorisation from the medical aid. Firstly I have to pay in R10100 because it is a fusion (according to the broker that introduced me to Medihelp, they don't like fusions). The rejected all the codes from the neurosurgeon except for one. They are willing to pay the orthopaedic surgeon. They rejected the codes because some of the codes are charged by the neuro and the ortho - like the spinal fusion - which can not really be called something else. But Medihelp says that they can not pay 2 specialists for the same procedure even though one is doing the neurological part and the other the orthopaedic part. They also rejected codes from the neurosurgeon because they say he is duplicating codes, even though he is doing that spesific code four times on different levels. They want him to charge for codes that he is not going to do. I first thought that the doctor was at fault, but I have now phoned 10 different doctors at 10 different hospitals and they all tell me that it is within their rights to charge these codes. ALL of them also asked me if I'm on Medihelp and said that that is the only medical medical aid that has issues with all of this and that they never pay and that the patient is almost always liable. I have to now pay the neurosurgeon R22000 and R4000 for the equipment that they are going to use. I also have to pay the R10100 before I can get admitted. I have a seventeen month old child that I can't pick up. I can not function at work properly anymore, I have severe pain and will most certainly go into either renal of liver failure because of all the pain medication I'm taking. Medihelp is the MOST USELESS medical aid I have ever heard of and if it wasn't for the fact that I had to go on it because of the company I work for, I would have cancelled it today. I would discourage anybody from ever joining Medihelp. Nobody wants back and neck operations but if you suddenly develop such severe pain and have a herniating disk that is disintegrating you don't have much choice. So unless you have R40000 just lying around for incase, rather consider another medical aid.</p>