Medical student makes a video on how to advocate for yourself at the doctor’s office
#4 – Ask your doctor for the differential diagnosis on each of your medical complaints or symptoms. That’s outstanding!
intercst
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At the end of the day the doctor is just one more supplier. Get the ones that work for you. With socialized medicine that’s hard to do. As far as I know, some prepaid medical plans don’t let you choose your doctors.
The Captain
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The Shiny system gives you even fewer choices. In the early 90s, RS changed it’s “health care” provider, to some jerkwater outfit I never heard of, that was based in Texas. I was living and working in Kalamazoo at the time. The nearest “in network” GP was in Grand Rapids, fifty miles away. Whether you like the “in network” doc, or not, is irrelevant, when there is only one choice, or none.
OD used Selectcare. When I went to WPI, which used Blue Cross, I had to change doc. When I retired, and bought insurance from Untied Health, I had to change doc again. Then I turned 65. and went on the “one size fits all, big gummit” Medicare, which pays “any willing provider”. For the first time, I didn’t need to change doc. Just strolled into the office of the one I had been using with United Health, and showed them the new card.
Steve
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That is completely false. It also assumes who has the most money has better access which is not always true.
There is medical talent far above that notion. There is the medical talent that lives for the money.
The last thing you want is a doctor who is solely motivated by money. In fact, the better doctors are really not motivated by money.
If all you want is a prostitute good luck. Not the way to go to a doctor or into a marriage.
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What world do you live in - doctors have bills to pay like everyone.?
Doctors are just people - some with good skills, some with worse, and a few who are exceptional good and exceptionally bad.
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I was raised by doctors. There are a handful who consider me a son.
Doctors can have financial problems. Often do. But realistically doctors are paid enough not to have any financial problems.
My BIL a doctor early in his marriage to my sister said let’s go to the islands for a junket. Pharma. The two of them got on the phone to my dad, “you want to be a whorre go right ahead.” That trip did not happen.
Dad was a doctor’s doctor. No one got away from his outspoken point of view. He fired his first cardiologist as if the man was a teenager disappointing him on the second day of treatment. The doctor was the head of cardiology. He built a hospital as head of admissions from 150 beds to 470 beds. He did all the diagnostics and decided the entire course of treatment for each patient coming in, then assigned all the patients to the doctors.
He did two internships back to back.
He took half the pay as a hospital doctor when doctors he trained and at times would not hire or trust hung shingles for twice the pay.
When the Who’s Who meant something he was the best in the region according to his peers. There were no others in his specialty listed.
If you want to believe doctors need the money and can be sloppy best of luck to you.
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Kind of the opposite in the United States. If you have private insurance, you are limited to doctors in your network. When you graduate to Medicare virtually all the providers are in the network.
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That is the least of trying to take care of yourself. It is a background issue with any care. From what I am reading here most of you are very confused as to your care.
Depends. In the US, you may be very restricted by your insurance plan. I’ve that on various self-help boards, you aren’t happy with your endocrinologist, you need to change your insurance plan. In Germany you can go to any endo who will take you, but as is the case everywhere in the world, there are too few specialists. I’m hoping that Ozempic et al will free up a lot of endos to become something other than diabetes specialists. Especially in the US. If you’re diabetic, no problem! If you’re hypercalcemic, you better read up because chances are the last time your endo informed himself on the topic was in medschool and there’s this bizarre tendency to try to treat hypercalcemia with large doses of vitamin D (this is not a good idea).
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INDEED! By the same token, in the US (and possibly other countries now that obesity is becoming prevalent on a mass scale, so to speak) if you’re not overweight and diabetic but have signs of a disease process that’s commonly associated with that state and metabolic syndrome…say, “mildly elevated LDL-C”, among others…you’ll be equally out of luck with timely intervention. The Healthy Lifestyle Bamboozle, I call it.
The overweight are so taking over the healthcare narrative that physicians today (and for the last couple of decades or so, I’dguesstimate) have such minimal experience of patients who’re sick in spite of being Good Custodians of their bodies that it can result in compromised care…if you’re not careful. For all the world as if they’ve forgotten that not all disease is self inflicted.
I, for spit sure, would be progressing rapidly to clinical manifestations of ASCVD without a bit of self advocacy.
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Note that “mildly elevated LDL-C” is often a sign of “mild” hypothyroidism. What’s your TSH?
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Not in me, it’s not. It’s due to a polygenic familial hypercholesterolemia. A condition masked by my healthy lifestyle choices and everything but my LDL-C showing rude good health. After a “by chance” discovery and a fair bit of judicious reading on the topic, I realised that there’s more to lipidology than the Usual Suspects on a lipid profile and I actually requested a measurement of Lp(a) and Apo-b lipoprotein at my annual physical early last year.
It would’ve probably been discovered earlier in somewhere like the Netherlands…as I’ve mentioned before (or even Canada?)
For but two relevant articles that’ve drifted across my radar screen recently…
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Three months ago there was going to be sensitivity for fat people. It is not that I am against that but is it something overweight people need? I get most will never lose an ounce but we need our society to change in this regard. Just making it perfectly okay won’t help anyone. It is not perfectly okay medically and in several other ways that are more private.
There are biases that have caused great harm. There are self-inflicted biases where regardless of social attitudes you have a problem with your lonesome.
I agree ex-cons should have the right to vote. But should ex-cons have to list that on job applications? Possibly for a period of time instead of for life.
If I wore my underwear on the outside of my pants I’d get fired. We can not have sensitivity training for that.
Why not?
Well, that wasn’t quite what I meant…and I admit I should’ve used “obesity” as a term rather than “the overweight” in the context of having medical issues addressed appropriately in a doctor’s office.
I agree that the HAES (Health At Every Size) movement has morphed into fat activism/obesity denialism of late. However, there’s no denying that…just like my past PCPs didn’t look beyond my fit physique and healthy lifestyle choices to address my developing ASCVD…when a doctor is too influenced by a stratospheric BMI, a concurrent, non-lifestyle associated problem can be missed.
I’ve oftentimes said (and now I have actual evidence in a way I didn’t expect) that good custodians of their bodies can have stuff out of left field come and bite them on their botties…or words to that effect, depending on whether it’s on TMF or not. The same is true of poor custodians also.
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Yep. Vegans who do Yoga get heart attacks and cancer, too.
intercst
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I am talking about society or social pressures, not a doctor.
Calling someone obese was a huge insult that was common if you were overeating. Now we let everyone slide as if all the fat is coming from a medical condition instead of overeating junk.
Overeating often leads to more inactivity. Inactivity makes very little difference to weight gain. Calories sure as heck do.
A most concise analysis of type 2 diabetes.
The junk is the highly processed industrial garbage masquerading as food. Before the agro industrial food explosion people ate anything they could get their hand on and there was neither global obesity nor global type 2 diabetes, these conditions were the privilege of the rich.
What the above also says is that there is no need for rigorous diets of this or that type, just eat a variety of real food, animal and vegetal avoiding the junk output of the agro industrial food complex which gave rise to the drug industrial complex that does not cure, it just targets symptoms.
The difficulty is the agro industrial food complex siren song. Junk food should have prominent warning labels just like liquor and tobacco do.
The Captain
Do you think that will change when the new anti-obesity drugs become widespread?
DB2
I dunno. I know enough about the issues to know I don’t know enough to have a meaningful opinion…but I’ll give the one I have.
These drugs and the ones coming down the pipeline appear to have a good success rate in the target population…the very overweight and obese (and beyond). Especially, it seems, in folk who just can’t hack doing what needs to be done over the long haul to maintain a workable energy deficit.
I’ve been keeping my eye on how they work/can be made to work in the folk who’re on their way there and for whom periods of strict accountability seem to be just breaks in the continuum (however confident the dieter might be that this time it’s for real). For all the evangelizing of the recent converts to Righteous Living and healthy eating, weight management is not that easy…especially when early starts on getting fat and disordered eating have laid down extra fat cells along with hard to break habits.
This tends to be the group that’s been demonised in the media, right? But this demographic might well turn out to have the “best” response with early intervention before the cardiometabolic changes and their sequelae have strayed too far from healthy homeostasis. No different, in a way, from early, aggressive intervention to prevent ASCVD in the genetically susceptible…or brushing and flossing diligently from your teens onwards.
Don’t get me wrong…I think everyone should be like me and not get fat in the first place 
, but that turkey’s already flown for a good many, right?
One of the many myths that assist the “getting fat” to get fatter
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