I hate the lots of them I tell ya.
Go for a routine exam, wait for an hour minimum (why the fuck do they schedule it every 15 mn if they can’t stick to the schedule??), they ask you a few questions, touch your stomach, hear you breathing and that’s it!!! And since the motherfuckers here get paid by the government (a few hundreds dollars I think for 10 mn work), you can forget about getting any better service. Half of them are incompetent and the other half has a god-complex.
Why the fuck do we need generalists anyway? A machine would do it much better, be open 24/24 and give me accurate estimates on how long I’d have to wait. And you wouldn’t have to deal with morons that got coerced by their parents in the profession for money and prestige - not for any passion or actual interest for medecine! Human touch my ass. More like systematic taxpayer ripoff. Won’t even take the time to verify the freaking picture on our socialized health card to make sure I’m not some visiting foreigner…
Goddamn cartel too, you can’t get any blood analysis or other actually informative diagnostic without going thru them… And you can forget about putting your dirty ignorant little hands on the results too! That’s probably why they can’t write for shit either - they do it on purpose.
Automated Medical Diagnostic Machine, that’s what we need!!
Problem is, they haven’t invented a machine that can do a good abdominal exam (it’s a bit more complicated than you think) and the machines we do have (CT scanners, MRIs etc ) are incredibly expensive, and still have to be interpreted by humans.
Machines aren’t good at medicine, they’ve tried using algorithms to diagnose various ailments, but because conditions can present with non-classical symptoms, you need to have people who can put two and two together and get the right answer, even if it seems the least likely answer of all.
Generalists are the sieve, the ones who weed out the serious illnesses requiring further investigation from the malingerers, hypochondriacs and people who just need someone to talk to.
If you didn’t have generalists, the waiting rooms of the specialists would be clogged with people who didn’t need to see them, or who were seeing the wrong specialist. You don’t need a specalist to tell you it’s probably a virus, drink plenty of fluids and rest, but you need someone with medical training to make sure it IS just a virus, and not something more sinister.
If you think your family practitioner is getting take-home pay of a thousand dollars an hour (implied by several hundred dollars for a 10 minute session), you’re mistaken.
You may want to consider this point about machines: Our monitor-defibrillators automatically analyze 12-lead EKGs. They’re usually wrong.
St. Urho
EMT-P