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Comment by zrail | Hacker News Reader

That's already a thing, at least everywhere I've ever lived. You have a primary care doctor, you see them at least once a year, they do a physical exam, maybe some blood work. This test maybe becomes standard of care for everyone annually.

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May be I have been living in a bubble. I remember doing a “annual check up” in the US about 5 years ago, and that was super basic - blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol levels etc. they didn’t even do a detailed enough bloodwork to test for allergies. Definitely not looking for any disease vectors.

Now, I live in DK, and my visit to the GP would always go with my hard attempts to convince my GP that something is really wrong and I am not a crazy lunatic who is simply looking for attention. Although, I have never directly asked for a checkup(while being healthy) to look for disease vectors. I’ll ask and see what they say.

I’d prefer if this is outside of the general healthcare system though. I don’t want to occupy Doctors, and medical labs from people who are actually sick _now_ and need those tests, and attention.

Another Danish person here, your GP would never check you in any sort of fashion here, unless you already have (serious) symptoms.

Same for me in Germany. You are eligible to one checkup when you turn 35, that's it, lol. Otherwise you have to convince the doctor a certain check is necessary. Usually doctors don't like that very much. I would even happily pay for it myself, but I still need to convince the doctor I'm not a hypochondriac.

Thats not true. The cost of the checkup are covered once before you turn 35 and every three years for anybody above the age of 35 [1]. Still, people have to be willing to do that checkup, make an appointment by themselves and so on.

Still, seeing what is and what isn't covered by public health insurance just seems so stupid. The focus on cure instead of prevention, and that not even particularly good. It's sad to see how much money goes to waste for useless treatments with something like homeopathy while people who really need proper treatment are stuck with the cheapest option that is paid for.

[1] https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/checkup.html (German)

Thanks for the correction, that was what my doctor told me. But maybe I also misunderstood him.

This approach actually works really well for conserving healthcare dollars. If a doctor feels like nothing is wrong, 99% of the time they’ll be right. Sucks to be that 1% where you die of a cancer that would have been caught, but that’s the trade off.

The marginal return of each dollars spent on screening goes down quickly. At a population level you can’t justify it, but at a personal level you can.

I don't think blood tests for allergies are a regular thing anywhere. It's generally done if you can't have the skin testing and the skin testing is something you go to a specialist for. It's not something that's screened for regularly.

This is not true in the Netherlands. You don’t get any tests if there is nothing wrong.

Healthcare in this country scares me.

You can ask for a blood test though and ask that they check specific markers. But I agree that huisartsen are too dismissive in general.

Same in Germany (Hausärzte). Even if you have a specific complaint, you'll just be told to go home and drink a lot of water. They just don't have the capacity to test for causes.

I'm not sure if I can even pay someone to make extensive tests here. Never tried. Perhaps one needs to go to the US for that.

Take control. Regular doctors in NL are basically there to prevent you from getting care.

Say you want a blood test, and what for. I they don't cooperate, move to the next doctor.

In the US, the medical system was (and might still be) the top third cause of death, of which 5/6ths were due to medicine side-effects.

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-doctors-responded-to-be...

I suspect doctors in the Netherlands are taught not to over-diagnose. Are they paid through national insurance?

Yes, the US medical system is a disaster.

Really? Not even a blood pressure check or a physician listening to your lungs or just examine your skin for weird moles?

That’s terrible.

I am leaving my current physician because I had a very strange, black patch on my back, surrounded by a 'bleached', growing circle.

Due to COVID, I provided videos to her assistant, which the physician reviewed. Physician claimed she needed better pictures ( obviously I had sent the best material ).

The response to that was : the doctor needs to see the patch herself.

Then when I arrived at the appointment she basically treated me like shit. I have filed a complaint with her practice.

This is NL.

my experience is totally differe t. just sayin

FWIW there's self-service blood tests with capillary blood at e.g. medivere.

Tried to do the cholesterol one, but couldn't get the blood into the tube shrug

No mammograms? No pap smears? No prostrate screening? That's shocking.

We do all of those, but they're all voluntary (as they should be), there are regular drives for all of these.

Did I reply to the wrong comment? I thought I was replying to one about how the Netherlands doesn't cover cancer screening under its national healthcare.

Which it does. That comment you replied to is complete bullshit.

For instance:

Breast cancer:

https://www.bevolkingsonderzoeknederland.nl/borstkanker/

Cervical cancer:

https://www.bevolkingsonderzoeknederland.nl/baarmoederhalska...

Colon cancer:

https://www.bevolkingsonderzoeknederland.nl/darmkanker/

That’s not good enough for cancer because we dont even know how fast or slow it grows. Even if it cancer cells multiplied at the rate of a fetus that would be too fast for an annual physical. Congratulations, death.

Ideally something like a wearable computer or nanomachines in your blood stream automatically report anomalies for individualized treatment.

> Even if cancer cells multiplied at the rate of a fetus

I suspect at least some cancers multiply slower than that, because they work against the rest of the cells.

Given the amount of "I don't want bill gates injecting me a tracker!", I have some idea of how a conversation with the same people about nano machines in their body would go.

I would also bet on the time-frame between this and the availability of your data on the servers of your health insurance.

Not my problem, human cancers stay in there own bodies and are not communicable

To our knowledge

Not normally, no. But there are some puzzling exceptions:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-cancers-that-are...

These are all in animals and I specified human cancers for that specific reason, thanks for the article though, I only knew about the Tasmanian Devil one

Yes, correct. But there are also some viruses that cause cancer that can spread from human to human (HPV for instance, the cause of cervical cancer), and the case of that doctor is some proof that at least in theory cancer can spread by blood or tissue contact.

Yeah got vaxxed against that, fingers crossed

I've never lived anywhere where this was common. The public health system can't afford to fund it and most of the population doesn't want to (or can't afford to) pay for it themselves.

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