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When to Say No to Your Doctor

posted by n1 on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-walk-it-off dept.

AnonTechie writes:

From Men's Journal:

Every time you walk into a physician's office, you run the risk of overtreatment: Tests you don't need, medications that are ineffective (or dangerous), procedures that cause more problems than they solve. In many cases the best thing for your health is to do nothing.

Make no mistake: A good doctor is, or should be, your most trusted resource if you're sick. If you're not sick and he wants to treat you anyway, that doesn't necessarily make him a bad doctor. But it does make him a player in a system that operates according to the unspoken and often unexamined assumption that more treatment is better for the patient. It's unquestionably better for the financial health of the stakeholders in the system: the doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, the health-insurance companies, and the hospitals. If you don't know how the game is played, the odds go up that you'll wind up the loser.

What do you people think, will people change if they know this?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 24 2014, @11:12PM

    by c0lo (156) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @11:12PM (#97961) Journal

    On that, it must be good news that the NHS is now using US private-healthcare consultants to see how they can move away from this apparently dreaded socialized medicine and move the money from the civil servants into the hands of outsourcing multinationals.

    Outsourcing multinationals? How about out-of-network doctors [nytimes.com]?

    “When the doctors work in the hospital, not for the hospital, which is often the case, they’re not obliged to join the same networks as the hospital,” said Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “And patients generally have no say in selecting those doctors. Sometimes the patients don’t even see them — for instance, if their X-rays get sent to a radiologist or their tissue to a pathologist,” patients won’t even know the name of that doctor until the bill comes.”

    The effect [nytimes.com]:

    Before his three-hour neck surgery for herniated disks in December, Peter Drier, 37, signed a pile of consent forms. A bank technology manager who had researched his insurance coverage, Mr. Drier was prepared when the bills started arriving: $56,000 from Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, $4,300 from the anesthesiologist and even $133,000 from his orthopedist, who he knew would accept a fraction of that fee.

    He was blindsided, though, by a bill of about $117,000 from an “assistant surgeon,” a Queens-based neurosurgeon whom Mr. Drier did not recall meeting.

    What are you doing to yourself, guys?

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