Current Events > Feels like this is all a general physician does these days...

(+) Yeah! (+)

Does a general antibiotic cure this?
Yes -> prescribe it
No -> prescribe it anyway to keep them happy

If symptoms persist?
Send them to specialist.

Anything else?
Send them to a specialist.

Does this skill really demand a brutal 15 years of college and 200,000 a year?

Excuse my ignorance if there's way more shit I'm missing. Srs.
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I think you are underestimating how often they tell patients that simply losing weight would solve most of their issues.
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KILBOTz posted...

I think you are underestimating how often they tell patients that simply losing weight would solve most of their issues.

when i had a seizure last month. all they did was prescribe some penicillin because of my bad teeth. i still have to find my damn insurance information.

fucking ambulance (it happened to my uncle under a different circumstance) the bill collectors are after him too.
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foreverzero212 posted...

No -> prescribe it anyway to keep them happy

i can see this. most people are morons. they probably think every time they don't leave the docs office with a script its a wasted visit.
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It really is a tip of the iceberg effect when it comes to a patient's perception of what they get out of care versus what actually is going on.

You had someone with an encyclopedic knowledge basically rule out a bunch of seriously harmful pathology by virtue of an appropriate history and physical. The rest is more of a problem with health care delivery as a function of efficiency and resources, not directly related to that physician's knowledge base. Not saying there aren't shitty and/or lazy docs out there, but in all likelihood, if you felt like you didn't get much out of the visit it's because there was nothing to get out of the visit. You had the sniffles.

foreverzero212 posted...

Does this skill really demand a brutal 15 years of college and 200,000 a year?

Yes.

Anyone can prescribe antibiotics to someone who looks sick.

The trick is catching the really subtle shit that can kill you before you know it. And you need to spot it 100% of the time, because the alternative is "oops, my bad, sorry you died."

No really. It seems like it's just prescribing random antibiotics at everything to you. But if you prescribed the wrong antibiotic to someone on warfarin and they fall and hit their head. Congrats, you killed someone. You really want that pressure? Knowing there are thousands of different drugs, each with their own unique mechanism of action, how they are metabolized, side effect profile, etc? This is on top of the knowledge of how each and every disease interacts with one another and affects what treatment choice? The possibilities are endless.

I'm being a little facetious because outpatient medicine isn't *that* complicated compared to the inpatient stuff. But even then, there is a LOT of harm that can be done from simple, benign things simply because someone doesn't know what they don't know, and that's fucking dangerous.

foreverzero212 posted...

Excuse my ignorance if there's way more shit I'm missing. Srs.

You're excused.
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