doctors suck!

Post by **Jonathan** » Thu Mar 13, 2008 11:00 pm

http://www.slate.com/id/2186446/

In my experience, doctors never get to fail at the treatment because they fail at the diagnosis first. It's all, "Antibiotics. Next!"

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abs ... 48/26/2635 - New England Journal of Medicine thinks your average doctor blows at treatment. Um, woot?

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 12:29 am

What?! You mean that doctors are typically not investigatory like we might see on House? Nooooo! Oh wait, DUH!

How much of this is due to the HMOs?

Post by **Jonathan** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 12:51 am

quantus wrote:What?! You mean that doctors are typically not investigatory like we might see on House? Nooooo! Oh wait, DUH!

How much of this is due to the HMOs?

The article claims that med school actually focuses entirely on diagnosis, i.e. House-style, without placing a corresponding amount of time training doctors to treat patients. My response above says they're doing a piss poor job of diagnosis, too.

Post by **Jonathan** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 12:54 am

You know how you don't get a network engineer to string CAT6 in your office? You hire a tech to do the routine jobs, someone who is trained in the best practices that other, more educated people have figured out. It seems to me that non-emergency internal medicine would benefit from a similar split in responsibilities. Sort of like a nurse practitioner, but awesomer?

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 1:01 am

gotcha. I agree that doctors are not so great at diagnosing stuff and only after complaining for a few visits in a row do they even really try. When they try, they usually just end up sending you to a specialist, who might do it right. So maybe there needs to be a follow-up study on how well diagnoses are performed in practice to prove/disprove this generality? Are the current charting practices good enough to detect this?

quantus · Post by **quantus** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 1:05 am

Dwindlehop wrote:You know how you don't get a network engineer to string CAT6 in your office? You hire a tech to do the routine jobs, someone who is trained in the best practices that other, more educated people have figured out. It seems to me that non-emergency internal medicine would benefit from a similar split in responsibilities. Sort of like a nurse practitioner, but awesomer?

The tech doesn't need to be licensed. An awesomer nurse practitioner would need to be. If the reward salary-wise isn't good enough to match the increased risk of malpractice, then this won't fly.