I remember when I was a kid, doctors were so interactive and really took time to get to know you and talk to you, learn about what you’re going through and explain things. Now as an adult, it’s been nearly impossible to find a doctor who is willing to take any amount of time to sit down, explain things, show any sort of compassion or empathy at all.
I suffer from acid reflux, and in order to diagnose that, they basically put a tube down your throat, it’s called an endoscopy. You have to be fully sedated with anesthesia and take nearly an entire day off of work because the way the anesthesia affects you, you can’t drive and someone has to drive you. Well for many years now we’ve had this other procedure which is a tube, but they put it through your nose instead. There’s been lots of research papers about the use of it, it’s used in other countries as a procedure regularly. So I asked several gastroenterologists if they offer the procedure and every single one of them said no, and would not provide any additional information or insight as to why you have to be completely sedated and pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for expensive anesthesia. I am simply blown away. It makes no sense. A research tested method that has been written about for about a decade now in actual research studies by board certified medical physicians, and no one offers it. Literally no one, and they won’t even consider it.
I’ve also been through at least several primary care physicians because the ones I have seen are so short and don’t really take time to get to know you at all. They just pop in, ask you a handful of questions and leave, if your test results come back with anything abnormal, they say it’s nothing to worry about, they don’t want to take any extra time to help look into anything or diagnose you… like wtf?
It just seems like doctors these days are out to get you to spend as much money as possible and do the absolute bare minimum for you in return. And now we have direct primary care options where you can circumvent insurance entirely, pay your doctor thousands upon thousands of dollars a year for the same level of care that we had in the '90s. But now you have to pay out of pocket for that in addition to your insurance. Wtfffff
Judging from my own doctors experience, they are way overbooked. Can’t get a personal experience when they gotta see a couple dozen more people the same day.
They’re paid by the job, not by the hour.
IOW they get paid a fee for the visit, a fee for any tests, etc.
Thank modern insurance for that.
They do not get paid any extra to have a conversation with you or to spend actual time with you to discuss whatever issues you are facing. I think the caveat is more that the GP/PCP is more likely to speed by you as they’ve got 20 more patients to see that day and a specialist will probably spend more time with you because they’re only trying to work on one issue rather than deal with weird pains, blood tests, talk to you about your weight, etc…
Doesn’t help that the insurance is the real employer and superior physician as they ultimately decides the treatment too
the united states is addicted to litigation. something that goes wrong is always someone elses responsibility and they will pay.
if a kid breaks their arm at school way too many humans decide ‘that school was negligent, no matter what the circumstances’ and they sue instead of collectively realizing kids do stupid things, and get hurt sometimes. this leaves school districts banning things like ‘tag’. banning being children
its the same nonsense with doctors. theyve been sued into seclusion of anything they arent explicitly required to do.
the insurance industry has a hand in managing doctors time also… theyre basically given zero time to work with patients or they cant make enough money to stay in business.
health insurance companies only profit when human beings suffer
Nah, it’s about cramming as many patients as possible into each day. If it was about litigation, being more personable and attentive would decrease the risk.
Cramming is due to insurance reimbursement t
it’s about cramming as many patients as possible into each day.
Using general anaesthsia and controlling everything reduces risk as compared to doing it with local anaesthesia which might cause discomfort, vomiting. These can get you sued. You never know who will be the person who will screw you just because you tried to save a few bucks.
General anaesthsia might save a few minutes during the procedure but along with the time for giving anaesthsia, recovery from anaesthsia, after care. It is both more time consuming and costly.
being more personable and attentive would decrease the risk.
You would think so but in real world the more you speak more material you would give if you get sued. Hence the doctrine be professional and cover your ass.
I’m not sure why you’re talking about anesthesia.
OP’s post was about anaesthesia.
No, they used anesthesia as an example. Their post was about doctors not spending time and communicating with patients.
Our Healthcare system is fucked. You really need to be your own advocate and do your own double-checking. Think about how many people are bad at their jobs, and realize that plenty of those people are doctors.
Afaik it has to do with licensing regulations and litigations…
A doctor is licensed to practice by the state, and must carry insurance on a state-by-state basis to acquire a license to practice.
The problem is that if you get sued 3 times you get blackballed by the insurance industry in your state and the insurance companies won’t insure you.
You see a lot of doctors moving states often, its often because they became un-licensable in their former areas.
I have limited industry experience and have talked to quite a few doctors who were indeed a bit distant and hands-off in their practice for this reason alone.
I’ve only tangentially heard about this, but another issue is that doctors in the US don’t have to, and aren’t encouraged to keep up with recent research.
Combine that with a medical education system that hasn’t changed drastically in 70 years to keep up with that new research and most US doctors are just out of date.
There is some variation by state but in the US almost all licensed medical professionals are required to participate in continuing education to keep their license.
Which is hit or miss. I’ve been in those CE courses and seminars, and they range from informative and exciting to literal time-wasting. An example: What doctor needs to care about log-rolling patients and backboarding them? That’s something a firefighter or EMT does.
Well yes, the onus is on the healthcare provider to pick CME that’s relevant to them.
Our ICD -10 is about a decade behind WHO, iirc.
I find a young doctor in a suburb almost 10 years ago. He’s been great and he listens to me, has no problem taking my suggestions into consideration, and he often admits when he doesn’t know something and will literally Google it right there in the room. It took as while to find someone I like, but it was worth looking.
I’m sorry you’ve gone through this, but I am also an American suffering from the same issues as you, and I have found no shortage of ENTs willing to shove the camera down my nose. That seems to be what they always recommend straight from the get-go.
Seems to be especially bad in Georgia where there’s very poor access to healthcare. More progressive places like NY may have different results I’m not sure. It’s just shocking, no one will even consider helping me
That is difficult. I assume you’ve tried Atlanta? I would think you would be able to find decent care there. If not, it might be worth traveling a few hours to wherever you can just to get a diagnosis at least.
And make sure the doctor or clinic knows in advance what you are seeking.
Ask the doctors who moved out of their home states instead of risking being jailed for “performing an abortion” when they were doling out life-saving medicine.
When you go to a doctor in the USA, you’re really being treated by their lawyer and insurance company.
And the practice. In most cases are doctors are now essentially hair stylists working for some larger entity. A larger entity with shareholders. If you want somebody that cares you probably need to go see a family practice with only one or two doctors. The problem is places like that run out of spaces to see people quickly.
Corporations, now. Can’t even really call it a practice. They are businesses that employ doctors. In law, most civilized places, you can’t own stake in a law firm unless you are a member of the bar. Makes for a more service focused industry.
Another thing I haven’t seen mentioned is the way people find doctors now has changed. People look online, and there are plenty of sites that are just aggregators for data about doctors. Anyone can scrape that info and then setup a webpage to rate doctors. So now doctors are finding that they aren’t getting patients if they aren’t getting good ratings, so now we have doctors just telling patients what they want to hear, prescribing what they want to be prescribed. Gotta keep up that 9.8/10 rating to keep patients coming in.
Capitalism.
Healthcare and insurance are for profit industries and the corporations running the healthcare and insurance business don’t give a fuck about the health of the patients. They want all the monies and want to move patients through as quickly and cheaply as possible to maximize their profits.
It’s exactly this. The policies put in place by “healthcare administrators” (MBAs and such with healthcare flavoring, not people that actually know how to care for people’s health like doctors and nurses) are designed to process the most patience in the least amount of face time possible, so that each doctor and nurse can see more patients per day, meaning more office visit fees, meaning higher profit. My dad calls it the “cattle shoot” and I feel that’s a pretty apt analogy. It’s the same general reason that fast food restaurants and pharmacies and department stores are perpetually understaffed: fewer staff members means lower “overhead” costs.
This combined with liability. If the patient gets anything even resembling an unsatisfactory result, they’re likely to sue the doctor.
Honestly, I think this is not true, in my experience at least. I think suing doctors was a feature of the '90s and early 2000s, but now people are so poor they can’t afford lawyers to sue a doctor for them, and medical malpractice runs so rampant that doctors don’t even seem to care at all. Everyone has had a bad running with a doctor, yet you’re very unlikely to hear of someone who has sued a doctor and gotten away with it.
What the US has isn’t free market capitalism. It is capitalism but with government imposed rules that are harmful to the common person. Your insurance depends your employer and you don’t get a reasonable choice - they put in $1000/month that if you go elsewhere you lose that. Of course what your employer wants and what you want are different. Your employer wants the lowest costs for something expensive, and they want you to not quit until they are ready to get rid of you. You want some service with that insurance, but you are not a player with power so you don’t get that.
The policies out in place by healthcare and hospitals arent forced by government… these policies are by the companies so its not even about “but da gubnent is ebil!”
They are the naturatual concequense of the policies put into place. They are not required but they are still the result that should be expected.
It’s not pure capitalism, but it’s definitely crony capitalism. Us plebs get fucked either way.
I feel compelled to point that out though as government provided health care is not the only possible solution, and I’m in the group that would oppose that. However I have provided a better alternative: eliminate the deductions for employer provided insurance. (I think the above about other benefits jobs provide - I should be comparing paycheck not “fringe benefits”.
Also, I don’t see how eliminating the deductions helps. And I don’t mean that in a snarky way. I’m genuinely asking how that would make the situation better.
When companies pay me more if I don’t take their insurance I have an option to choose something better. Right now I have no optioniso nobody cares to serve me.
The profit motive needs to be removed from healthcare, or patients will continue to get fucked.
Healthcare needs to be separated from employment, and the profit motive needs to be removed from healthcare.
Should the government run it? Maybe not, but what’s the alternative? It’s like every election. Choosing one of two bad choices and hoping you choose the less bad.
And in the case of healthcare, I’ll take government run, profit free, tax funded healthcare over what we have now.
Edit: autocorrect error.
Non profit, non vertically integrated healthcare. Letting the insurance companies “partner” with the pharmacies and hospitals is monopolistic or at best duopolistic in some markets. And it lets them charge whatever or threaten to leave a community. Which has happened repeatedly in my area. Then the biggest hospital in the area buys up another small one and the costs go up again.
This might be better for wealthy people but it’s hard to see how this would benefit the very poorest who are in most need of health care. What does this solution do for them?
Only a tiny minority who mostly don’t have jobs and thus no insurance and so we already need to do something different. For the middle class this is better.
What about contracting a terminal illness like cancer where you might not be able to work. You need a job to keep your healthcare but if an illness or disability that you have or get at some point stops you from working and you need to pay for that healthcare, what do you do?
I think insurance should cover you for all current conditions for life even if you otherwise switch insurance for new issues
Thats BS theres plenty of lower class who have jobs and get shit insurance. I shouldnt have to say this…
But sure the middle class is more important
The middle class is much larger. Not ignoring the plight of them, but don’t force something subpar on me just for a small percetage. With several hundred americans there are a lot of poor but still a tiny percentage
this is such a cliché, short-sighted oversimplification that doesn’t address the root of how individual physicians end up caught in these systems of apathy.
like yes capitalism is part of the problem but that’s about as useful as saying, why is there climate change? capitalism! like sure, yes, but isn’t there so much more to the story that can inform us on why the systems are the way they are, so that maybe we can address it? or i guess lemmy.ml users already have that answer, just start a global revolution and hope the winners care enough to fix it before all the survivors die of heat stroke dysentery and starvation, easy. capitalism. upvotes to the left.
How do people not get so sick of this meme of an answer?
Its like how every opinion teenagers have is the antithesis of their parents ideology.
What if a communist doctor withholds execllent care to preserve resources for the motherland?
We do get sick of it, but only because it’s always true.
Im not convinced alturism seeps from our pores when currency is taken away. I would say its more human nature to claim and horde anything of value, and those who are generous will slowly give up their equity to those who arent generous.
If the system is changed to force people to be generous or outlaw hording then you would see people with power continuing to do it, as they do now.
Maybe captialism is just what fits because this is what we are.
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Capitalism/the profit motive is how physicians get caught in these systems of apathy. My comment isn’t an over simplification, it is the root cause.
Is the entirety of the healthcare system incredibly complex? Absolutely, and within that complex system there are all sorts of problems that could be teased out to study and address. None of that will dramatically change the outcome of a system that is designed solely to extract as much profit as it can.
When profit is the primary goal of a healthcare company (and the legally mandated responsibility of that company if it is publicly traded) the end result is the system we have.
Not a doctor and just talking out my ass, but I’m assuming part of it has to do with patient workloads and dealing with insurance companies, they’re just not incentivized to really take any time with patients, just get 'em through the visit, check whatever boxes they need to, and move on.
But yeah, I very much have had the same experience for the past 10 years or so with my same doctor, it just feels absolutely useless going to them for anything. It takes alot for me to go to the doctor for anything or to bring anything up even with the doctor if it’s not life-threatening. I’m not a hypochondriac by any stretch, I just try to keep an eye out on my health and if I notice my body doing something out of the ordinary, I just ask about it to see if it means anything.
Before my regular check-up though I’ll kind of bank up whatever questions or oddities that I’ve noticed, things that I figure I can bring up and see if maybe it’s a sign of one thing or another. Most of the time when I mention anything though, it just feels like the doctor is blowing me off, or he’ll just give a guess, maybe google it and show some pictures. At best he might tell me something like, “Hmmm, well it’s probably not cancer.” and then just sort of shrug and move on. I’m a guy, so I’m used to no one caring about my health or well-being at all, but I think I had a different image in my head when I was a kid about what it was doctors actually did.
The one regular benefit I see from going to the doctor is getting my blood drawn and being able to track health numbers from that, my job does the same thing too, so I get two sets of numbers from my blood work every year and I track it to see overall condition of my health, which I kind of wish was something my doctor did. He’ll mostly just comment the most obvious thing possible when the test results come in, but there’s never a look at health numbers over time, which is why I started just tracking it on my own.
I’ve also been through at least several primary care physicians because the ones I have seen are so short and don’t really take time to get to know you at all. They just pop in, ask you a handful of questions and leave, if your test results come back with anything abnormal, they say it’s nothing to worry about, they don’t want to take any extra time to help look into anything or diagnose you… like wtf?
Because we’re not people to them. They’re incentivized to treat us like cars. Repair as fast and as many as you can to get the most money.
Insurance companies have control over what the doctors can do and over their schedules. They are only allowed to spend certain amounts of time with patients or they get in trouble. All the doctors I’ve talked to hate this. Blame insurance companies and the hospitals for prioritizing profit, not the doctors.
Yes, but to clarify: the time constraints are imposed by for-profit healthcare businesses trying to optimize billable time because insurance will only reimburse for so much time, rather than being imposed by the insurance companies directly. (It’s generally not quite as silly in the non-profit sector.) I work in healthcare in the US: we all hate how it works. The system sucks and it interferes with the quality of care that can be provided, leaving patients worse off just so that greedy can be fed. It’s just asinine that anyone who has no medical knowledge/training is making decisions about how patient care can be implemented, especially where there’s a profit motive involved. We really need to pivot to single-payer or national healthcare system, and abolish for-profit ownership of hospitals.
They can spend as much time as they want with the patient. The insurance simply caps how much is billable.
The medical industry and the insurance industry are locked in a battle for money, and you don’t have a lot of say in it. I used to run an ambulance service. Let’s discuss.
If I took you to the hospital, and you were on medicare, there was a fixed rate to pick you up and a per mile rate. I got paid part by the government and part by the patient, who I was legally required to bill. If I failed to adequately bill the patient (10% or so), if I lied on the parts and mileage, silver bracelets and court time. We loved billing care/caid, because it was a fixed price, and we knew the payer of 90% paid regularly.
If you have private ambulance transport, you have no idea what you’ll get. The patient can have a $13,000 deductible, a 50% copay, and. $20,000 per-event cap. There’s no rule what a reasonable bill can be. The insurance company is trying to rig the game so the patient pays most of the bill while paying that sweet monthly premium at the same time. The ambulance is trying to be reimbursed for the time and materials. The red states opened the door for the patients to again be uninsured and pay you $0 for everything. So bills have to be high, to ensure some money comes in from insurance, to insure things can keep running. I would have loved to have a country of all care/caid and it be illegal to live there otherwise. They’d be the best cared for poor and old people in the world, getting quality care backed by the “only if you’re poor or old” US single-payer system.
But we have what we have, and it’s been well sold to enough clueless people that it’s here to stay.
The US healthcare system is built around money and profit. A cheaper procedure which does not require general anaesthetic costs less, and reduces profit. That can be beneficial to the providers but bloat is incentivised in the US healthcare system as providers battle with insurance companies for money. Crudely healthcare providers don’t care about saving you money; they want to take as much money as they can get.
Meanwhile, countries with tax funded health care opt for the most cost effective procedures, investigations and treatments. The incentive is to reduce costs and offer the most effective things to the most people possible. That can also sometimes have negative side effects if not carefully regulated but in such systems generally Doctors advocate for the best procedure and best medical practice, as they themselves do not directly benefit financially from which procedure is pushed. The downside is you do get the opposite side of things where patients are dissuaded from things as they’re not deemed cost effective by those who control the spending.
