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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
bydeuist ( 228133 ) writes:
I'm an ER doctor. I can't create patients as they come to me with symptoms. I will say that people come to me with minimal symptoms such as cough and fever and then demand blood work, X-rays, and antibiotics, even though the majority of the time their symptoms are caused by a virus and will get better all on their own. Somehow, our society has become so weak that every cough, scraped knee, or hangnail requires a visit to the hospital. And somehow we think that physicians can't diagnose anything without a
byguanxi ( 216397 ) writes:
Here's a perspective from the other side of the relationship: If you want an honest, intelligent assessment from a doctor, good luck. Most doctors I interact with treat everyone like ignorant hypochondriacs, insist I waste my time on pointless visits, and don't seem to understand basic risk management.
A good decision should be based on the cost/benefit analyses of the distributions of outcomes. If I ignore this symptom, what is the distribution of outcomes? Is there a 50% chance of serious harm? 5%? 0.05%?
bySycraft-fu ( 314770 ) writes:
Well not regular e-mails. By law they can't because of HIPAA and all that they can't use e-mail because it isn't encrypted. However they contract with a HIPAA approved messaging service you can sign up for. More or less you pay $15/year for a login to a HTTPS site that does messaging which satisfies the requirements. Via that I can e-mail my doctor and get a response. Now that doesn't mean everything gets solved through e-mail, but I can get simple questions answered.
Likewise my insurance offers a 24 hour nurse line. I can call any time and speak to a registered nurse and have questions answered. The questions they can answer are less than a doctor, of course, nurses are the "level 1 tech support" of medicine but they can be helpful for many things.
To me it seems like their support works a lot like the computer support I do professionally does: You can contact via e-mail or phone for simple questions, however if something more serious is wrong, I'm going to make you bring your computer down (and they make me bring myself i) so I can have a look at it personally and render a more informed diagnosis.
If your doctors don't do that, then perhaps it is time to shop for new doctors.
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