[Notice: This post is a plain inquiry, not any invitation whatsoever to any debate.]
The query here is addressed to medical doctors, and medicine users who want to benefit more and better from medicine at lesser cost, trouble, time, and specially danger – or even do without medicine if possible when there is no compromise to life and health.
(Please proceed right away to the last three paragraphs, if you are in a hurry.)
Before anything else, I do practice medicine substitution; but I assure all here that I do not take risks with myself and my family and people, very few, who might ask for my suggestions about more economical substitutes, dropping prescribed medicines, taking less dosage or less times; when obviously to comply faithfully would be harmful to the medicine consumer; even though I am not a doctor in medicine. But modesty aside, I do possess some knowledge from personal experience in the use of medicines and medical procedures, and do more reading and more thinking and more observation about medicine than most people.
From my own interactions with doctors and from what I hear from others, some doctors do prescribe more medicines, more new ones, and more expensive ones, than other doctors. Now, I do think that it is a fact doctors prescribing more medicines, more new ones, and more expensive ones do not necessarily do a better job, than doctors prescribing less medicines, older ones, and more economical ones.
Then also doctors do commit mistakes in prescribing medicines and medical procedures; and there are instances where doctors act with the wrong knowledge and even the wrong skills or without skills.
Pardon the crude analogy, but consulting a doctor is no different in essential aspects from enlisting the service of an auto mechanic, insofar as getting a function back in order or restoring it: of a person’s physiology in the case of the former, and of a locomotive mechanism in the case of the latter.
Here are my two questions addressed to doctors, and to medicine consumers like myself who might have better knowledge of the discipline and practice of medicine from their own experience and observation and reading and thinking:
One: Is there some kind of government office or from some medical association whose only work is to review the medicines and medical procedures or routines prescribed by doctors to a medicine consumer, on the request of this consumer, in order to point out what safer, better, or more economical alternatives or substitutes are available?
Two Shouldn’t there be such an office from the government or at least from some medical association?
Susma Rio Sep