Is this that socialist health care system Americans are supposed to want to pay $4 trillion per year for?
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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These hypochondriac sponges are/were also responsible for the over-prescription of antibiotics, back when doctors would grant requests for them for damn near anything, bacterial infection or not.
I always wondered why MDs would do this. Just to shut patients up? Was there some sort of profit motive?
Definitely multifactorial.
Other considerations are liability and doubt.
Also faster processing times and better patient satisfaction scores (which can influence pay in the US).
Essentially overtreatment never gets sued while undertreatment always gets doubted when a 1 in 1000 outcome happens.
It also takes a lot longer to do a comprehensive assessment and chart documentation to back up your decision to forego treatment then it is to simply skip to the end and hand out boilerplate prescriptions to everyone.
There's also the fact that most routine symptoms that patients present with the most have no useful alternative to offer other than reassurance and time (pink eye, coughs, runny noses, ear aches, rashes, sore throats, nausea/vomiting/diarrhea, abdominal pain, etc).
This reminds me of an anecdote from Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who was an MD.
He was on board a passenger ship when a bunch of people got sick with food poisoning, so he lined them all up and shot a 1/4 grain of morphine into them, reasoning "no matter what's wrong with them, they'll feel better immediately." They all puked their guts out on deck.
Thanks for the very informative reply.