There aren’t enough doctors or specialists. So what to do? The answer for most shouldn’t be “alternative medicine” where any whacko “treatment” is an appropriate stand in.
The artificial scarcity created by doctors gatekeeping is unnecessary.
For example, I successfully diagnosed my own anemia disorder (thalassemia) this way. It's a simple test. I paid for it. The results are unequivocal. We can now stop giving me iron, thank you very much.
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/06/13/1104141...
Got an appointment in less than a day. The nurse practitioner probably gave me a more thorough look over (absent labs) than my primary care would have. Gave me an inhaler prescription probably as much to do something other than tell me to just continue the OTC medication I was already taking.
Sure, in an ideal world, we'd probably have a next-day MD appointment for everyone. But there's a ton of stuff when an ER or physician isn't really called for.
I'm not a hypochondriac and maybe in a pre-COVID world I'd just have assumed I was "fine" but having a second opinion seemed warranted given the option.
I've also been in an ER when the diagnosis from an infectious disease specialist (after some really bad lab work and high fever) was basically go home, rest, and drink plenty of fluids when his assessment (of a fairly serious tropical disease) took a month to be confirmed from a lab in Paris.
So we just basically self-diagnose and assume it will all just get better?
In one case, it would have been pretty ridiculous for me to have gone to the ER given that I didn't otherwise have COVID or other serious symptoms.
In the other case, in spite of a pretty high fever, I'm quite confident that had I gone into the local rural ER at the time they would have had zero idea about the tropical disease I had and, even after I got home with a fairly persistent mild fever, my very experienced primary care MD just knew that my blood work looked bad and it took an on-call infectious disease specialist to know what was going on.
You're not always going to have an expert specialist available.
Not that it mattered in either case because there wasn't really anything they could do other than let my body do its thing.
And France places an ER doctor in emergency response ambulances - apparently that has value (and they sometimes park themselves while the doctor works to stabilize the patient rather than try to bounce around to the ER.)
Same for France and urgent care. If the phone screen goes in the right direction, a doctor driving around from patient to patient will get to you quickly (~ 20 minutes last time for me.) Even if you don't have local insurance, and for a surprisingly low price.
None of this is impossible - as the US med professions want you to believe.
NP: "if it gets worse go to the ER" Thanks...I guess.
Much of the medical field is like this unfortunately, it's not just doctors. Take for example this article about Duke's Nursing School and racism: https://archive.is/DIJ98. From what I've heard through third-party, corruption at Duke is at an all-time high. This is just the stuff we hear about too, so I'm sure these problems affect all of the top-tier colleges that nobody reports so they don't get ejected from these programs.
So baseline if you're smart and hard working, you need to take the hardest college track from ages 18-22, medical school (22-26). Then work two jobs worth of hours as a trainee making well under 100k starting at age 27 and into your early 30s [3] so you can't save or pay down any of your debt from getting here.
So if you choose to be a doctor, you have to: (a) dedicate to working your ass off at 18, (b) keep at it until you're in your early 30s, (c) start with massive debt
I think it's actually pretty amazing that we have as many doctors as we do.
[1] https://medschoolinsiders.com/medical-student/how-long-is-re... [2] https://www.ama-assn.org/medical-students/preparing-residenc... [3] https://www.inspiraadvantage.com/blog/how-much-do-medical-re...
Why not just expand the amount of spots and train more doctors? Surely they don't take everyone that applies and then filter them out (even CS doesn't do that).
In my opinion though, I can't see why the number of doctors should be something that is principally controlled by congress at all, and ideally some other method should come about.
Until that happens though, it's up to Congress to fix this.
Looking around the world, it seems to me that most developed countries (if not all) suffer from the same problem of lack of doctors. Some mask it by pulling doctors from poorer countries (including poorer developed countries), but it seems like there's a lack of doctors everywhere. If that's the case then Congress can't really be the only limiting factor.
Why are there no developed countries that have far too many doctors? The only countries that I can think of that export doctors are Cuba and third world countries.
Unfortunately most people taking notice of how broken the system is end up get fixated on the large figures on those fraudulent bills, and think single payer can do something to fix at least part of the system. But systematically, at best single payer would be tying the garbage bag off for tidy disposal, when what we actually need is for the sheer majority of medical care to have a functioning market that allows for patient agency.
Blood count tests used to be done by people actually counting cells. Now, it's all machines, likely even in a very poor countries.
Please don't add racial and gender resentments into an already bad problem.
Neither the US nor Europe has enough medical professionals to drag arbitrary racial and gender demands into the mix.
And without old doctors in general being willing to work even though they could enjoy their retirement, many places in Europe would have no healthcare left. Which doesn't bode well for 2040 or 2050.
But when you have to choose between a overworked and exhausted doctor, who gives you 10 seconds of slight attention, then I might choose the AI, mixed with my own judgement.
Anyway, why not more of both? Better AI tools and more doctors?
We can learn new domains, assess risk, and evaluate trade-offs.
This is our health. Self-research is love. It's advocating on your behalf.
That is completely meaningless in this context.
One thing you plausibly could do is attempt medical tourism, if nothing else, your perspective will improve.