"I haven't pooped in a week." "Hmm, how many servings of roughage do you eat per day?" "All of them. I eat ten apples for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I eat the solids left in the juicer after making my all-organic smoothies." "OK, I guess we'll have to do a DRE. Do you mind if my interns help?"
"How often do you floss." "Ten times a day." "That's curious, because your gums started bleeding like a Tarantino movie when my hygienist waved the box of floss in your general direction."
I learned the hard way when I faked appendicitis and ended up in surgery when I was 12. :-)
Awesomly put... and funny as hell too.
I would hear stories of folks that can't see anything, look up and can make it out alright. Finally get in for a vision test at 34 to find that glasses help out tremendously. Sure, I could read before, but now it is just easy.
So, it isn't that I would avoid the doctor. But for many things, if you don't go to a specialist, the answer to the question of "how are things" is usually "getting along, no major complaints."
However, there is a different phenomenon. Sometimes, going to the doctor is not so straightforward. You have to go to a clinic, wait an unspecified amount of time to see the doctor. Once there, he'll prescribe several inconvenient things. And you know, we got stuff to do.
I went to a doctor a few months ago. I then had to do two tests, an abdominal ultrasound (which was fine, and I did), and several stool tests. These, I took my time. When I finally got around to doing them, I found out there is a time limit and the lab won't do them. I now have to go back to the doctor so that he can order them again. It's been months now.
I'll go back there... someday.
1.Money 2.Takes forever to get an appointment with any specialist 3.Busy schedule 4.Money 5.See 1and 4
Really, all this could be solved if more medical school were allowed to be opened and get rid of the arbitrary ceiling on the number of students med school are allowed to accept .
This is only the easy part. If you don't have insurance, it's a nightmare.
In the case of my father, he went to a general doctor. Got referred to another specialist. Who then referred him to another specialist. $600 later (a huge amount of money to most normal people) and no diagnosis, he decided to just "deal with it".
1. We have a local doctors surgery which has offices for around 5 GP's and 2 nurses. You can request an appointment with a specific one but most people just take whoever is available soonest. Although I've come across a few bad doctors for the most part people seem to trust the system to weed them out.
2/3. For me this means calling a number and asking for the next available appointment. If work is a problem they have a few nights where they work late and you can request the next available appointment on a late night. No need to take time off unless it's imperative you get seen quickly.
4. This is true but I find with an appointment that hasn't been arranged last minute I get seen within 10 minutes of turning up.
NB: I'm in the UK so obviously there are differences to how the systems we're both describing work.