Well, I for one am glad for you, and thank you for the advice.
I have osteoarthritis in my ankle, because I apparently fractured it when I was 16, and didn’t realize I’d fractured it, so it wasn’t set. I had surgery in 2009 to remove a bone fragment and two bone spurs. The ankle still goes wonky on me now and then, and gets sprained easily. I’m a vegetarian, but I’m tempted to try you fish oil any way, just to prove you wrong.
How many days do I take it, and what is the dose? or does it work only for knees?
Triple Strength Fish Oil, GNC Brand. 1 a day. After 7 days u will feel a difference
35 years old
Joint pain is a symptom of many different ailments, some are minor, some are not. Joint pain that comes on suddenly and goes away suddenly is often viral in orgin.
In general, I would say the pain relief and the fish oil may have been coincidental. Fish oil is good for controlling triglicerides, it is not a cure-all.
The doctor possibly could have done some labs to see if you had a viral infection, but since there isn’t treatment for a minor viral illness, it wasn’t a bad decision. It saved you money.
I’m not defending your doctor, 50% graduated in the bottom half of their class. 
Y’know why I hate going to the doctor? Went last week, and whilst in the waiting room I picked up a magazine to read (as you do). It was only when I got to the page talking about Prince William and who he was likely to hook up with permanently that I looked at the DATE on the mag.
My doc is a cheapskate.
Look, let’s face it you are having an emotional response and most people can’t be dissuaded from an emotional response by logic or facts.
But anyway…
Here’s the economics answer to your question: they get paid so much despite their limitations because that’s what the market will bear. Apparently, a lot of people have the view that going to a doctor is better than the alternative of not going to a doctor, even though it costs a lot, and even though the doctor might not be able to help. This creates demand for doctors’ services. Apparently, that demand is sufficient that doctors can go on charging what they do, despite the limitations on their abilities.
I can’t say for sure why people have the view that it’s worth going to a doctor. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s because people understand that even though there is a chance the doctor won’t be able to help, that is outweighed by the chance that the doctor will be able to help.
You might say, why don’t doctors charge only if they are successful? They could do that, no doubt. I can see several practical difficulties with charging on a “success” basis. But even leaving those difficulties aside, overall charging on a success basis wouldn’t keep the cost down: doctors would just have to start charging more (probably much more) to patients who have something curable, to make up for all the time that doctors would have to spend on patients that they can’t cure.
Not to mention that when they can help, it can sometimes be the difference between life and death. Your kid have strep? Bloody hell, yes, take him to the doctor. The four dollar medicine she can prescribe can cure a disease that used to kill children, or leave them permanently disabled.
And we (or I) also go to the doctor to be told what I have ISN’T strep, or a tumor, or Ebola. Learning what it isn’t by ruling out life threatening things is sometimes more important than getting a certain diagnosis of what it is.
How is it “more important”? Let’s say the patient has a sore throat, not strep.
In Scenario A, he goes to the doctor, tests are run, he gets billed $X, no prescription is made for medication or further action, no definitive diagnosis is made.
In Scenario B, the same guy decides not to go to the doctor at all. He now has no $X bill to worry about, the same prescription of nothing, and one less piece of information. How is this useful? If he was extremely worried about having strep, finding out he doesn’t could be worth $X (though probably is not), but if he wasn’t, what difference could it make if he now knows he doesn’t have it? He might as well have kept his $X and remained ignorant.
I think you underestimate the importance to many people of reassurance and knowing you’re not going to die. If it IS Strep, antibiotics are important, not to cure the sore throat, but to prevent Scarlet Fever and/or damage to the heart valves. If I don’t go in for a look (and preferably a culture), then I don’t know if I’m risking permanent damage.
If I have a sore throat and the doctor can confirm it isn’t Strep, then I don’t particularly care whether it’s a Coronavirus, a Rhinovirus or Herpangina. It doesn’t matter - the answer to all three is “rest, plenty of fluids and wait it out a week”. Getting a definitive diagnosis isn’t the important part - ruling out Strep is the important part.
If in a week, it hasn’t gotten better, then we can look at more testing to see if maybe it’s chlamydia or a GERD or something else they can do something about. But if it’s not Strep, it’s probably just a cold.
“Knowing you’re not going to die”??? :dubious:
That “reassurance” has less than no value. Strep or no, you will most certainly be dying.
But let’s ignore the absurdity of your claim of the comfort of assurances of immortality… Knowing you don’t have strep BUT the doctor does NOT know what you DO have certainly does not mean you have eliminated the worst possibility. Maybe you have throat cancer, flesh-eating bacteria, herpes, or worse. Eliminating one rather treatable possibility, strep, should serve as no reassurance that you’ll be okay at all. And if you’ve never even heard of strep, you wouldn’t even worry that you had it in the first place. Now you are $X poorer and possibly a week closer to death when you go back next week to find out a few more things you don’t have.
For pain relief / discomfort issues, you’re better off going to a chiropractor or a physical therapist than a medical doctor. Doctors can address the underlying issues, but they don’t have the experience with muscles, joints, and pain that chiros / therapists do.
(there are some bad chiros out there, if you find one that is into woo or thinks he can cure cancer by manipulating your spine, run away)
I wouldn’t have said more important, myself, but it is important, and for some people, as important. If you work with certain populations, it is very important to assess your degree of infectiousness, and how serious what you have can be if passed on to them.
My husband is a hospital lab tech, and he regularly works among people who do direct care with people in experimental trials for cancer treatments. If he has cold symptoms, he is not supposed to go into work, and he is supposed to go to a doctor STAT. The flu or strep can be devastating for cancer populations, but a common cold can be pretty bad as well. Chlamydia as a throat infection would be pretty bad, but also much more difficult to transmit, especially with the handwashing, no-share (of cups, utensils, finger foods, and such) protocols in the hospital. My husband is required to get a flu shot, but he could still get an attenuated flu, or, because he works in a hospital, a strain that is not in the year’s vaccine, and it would manifest probably more like a cold than a flu. But he would need to stay home for several days. If he had strep, he would need to stay home until he had no fever AND had been on antibiotics for 24 hours. For other bacterial infections, the protocol is the same as strep. For non-flu viruses, the protocol pretty much depends on his doctor; he needs to inform his doctor where and with whom he works, and his doctor decides when he can go back (typically it’s no fever, and no sneezing or runny nose, cough infrequent or at least well-controlled by non-narcotic medicine).
We have good insurance, but we also keep track of all of this for tax deductions; it’s never benefited us over the standard deduction, but it is allowable as a work expense, since it’s required. DH gets sick pretty rarely, fortunately. He has the immune system of someone who grew up in a cesspool.
NOTE: any random characters are due to cat just running over keyboard.
This reminds me of a friend I have whose line of work (athlete) results in him getting a lot of concussions. He has terrible health insurance, but usually does go to the emergency room for them, where they always tell him the same thing, to quit doing things that cause head injury and that he needs to take time off and rest. He never follows this advice.
“It’s a good thing I went to the hospital. Turns out I have another concussion,” he says.
“What did they say to do?” I ask.
“Same thing as always”
“Are you going to do it?”
“No, I have to work, how am I going to pay my bills?”
:smack:
Probably this seems logical to him because of all the blows to the head. He is immune to reason.
Knowing you don’t have Contagious Disease X does NOT mean you don’t have a different equally-or-more-contagious disease. Without knowing what you DO have, you cannot assess your degree of infectiousness. Eliminating things you do not have is useful, yes, as part of diagnosing what you have. It is not particularly important as a thing unto itself in the unknowable-in-advance case that you do not have it.
Which brings us right back around to the beginning of the argument again. The doctor has looked into the most common cause, and has no reason to suspect anything worse at this point. If you don’t get relief based on the best advice the doctor has to give you at that initial visit - the thing that works for most of the people most of the time - then you communicate that with the doctor and together you figure out the next step. In the case of a sore throat, that means calling the doctor if you’re not better in a week or so.
Or do you want a full body MRI, CT, EKG and full labs run on every sniffle? Just in case? *That *sounds awfully expensive.
Technically, no, you can’t. But for practical applications, you can often make a reasonably accurate extrapolation by way of exam findings, possible exposure, etc. I mean, a couple years ago, I went in for a flu test because I had sudden onset of headache, fever, chills, and sore throat. They didn’t test me for dengue, malaria, or Legionnaire’s disease, but it being December in Kentucky those all seemed like long shots. So once the flu test came back negative, the most likely culprit was a fairly ugly cold.
You said “learning what it isn’t by ruling out life threatening things is sometimes more important than getting a certain diagnosis of what it is.” Now you want to get back to what the doctor should or should not do. That doesn’t change the fact that your statement is false–ruling out specific things which you don’t have may be a good step in making a diagnosis. If you don’t have those things, you are not inherently better off than if you had not had the test. Your illness is what it is, the test doesn’t help you get better unless it points to a course of action or treatment.
For which there was no treatment, so in the end, your health would be exactly the same had you not had the test.