A Healthy Blog has two examples. Click on over there and find out.
Remember that there are people in this country, who had the bad luck to be laid off (maybe Bain bought their company) or can’t find work that offers insurance. They do without checkups, flu shots, screening tests to detect cancer early, etc. They live one illness or one accident away from bankruptcy or eviction.
They number 47 million.
Our commonwealth is bringing more people into our community, taking care of their health. There’s much more to be done to change that 47,000,000 to zero, but we are making progress.
Please share widely!
PCPs hurt health care. Personal doctors impede full disclosure of important medical facts (embarrasment) and impede access to routine visits (scheduling). Maybe there are some people who appreciate having “a doctor” but for the vast majority of us, it is a burden, and it is burden on public health for all of us. It is really a union tactic by the AMA that we all have to go through our PCP to get seen for whatever ails us. All we want to be sure of is that the doctors and nurses who are seeing us know about our prior history and that they will keep our private problems to themselves. We don’t need a “family doctor” who we can’t divulge our indiscretions to. We should get rid of PCP’s and replace them with a secure information network that lets random doctors know what they need to know.
Each human being is their own biologic entity with very peculiar idiosynchrasies. Allergy and paradoxical risk/benefit are peculiar to each human. The only person who will know that is your “family” physician.
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p>Besides that it has been my experiance that well over 30-40% of medicine is psychophysiologic. In many cases a pt. will present with physiological manifestations of a disesase process or the symptoms of a disease process which are primarily attributable or exacerbated by what’s going on between their two ears. Again– your “Doktuh” or family physician will understand this.
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p>But what do I know?
so that my allergies and stuff are stored in a secure database and available to all doctors that need to know. It is a huge bottleneck to have one old man keep this information in his head, or in files in his office. We need a much better health care information system with secure access to our data from anywhere, so that all doctors had access to only the relevant information. Things that this doctor doesn’t need to know wouldn’t be shown, and a smart enough system would know what different people should know. People could enter in tons of information at home that could help diagnose and track symptoms and alert people when they ought to see a specialist.
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p>And even a doctor that you have never seen before can make a psychophysiologic human connection, often strangers can be warmer than someone you are stuck with.
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p>I remember, MCRD, that you often point out that no one talks about where these extra doctors are going to come from, who is going to provide the care for everyone? Well, one of the ways to solve that problem is to stop insisting that we must have a great PCP for each person that sees us for everything, and move to a system of nurses and specialists armed with full information. And since there will be more care given out by general clinics and nurses, and better and cheaper lab work, the 60 year old cardiologists won’t need to treat my strep throat.