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The darker side of being a doctor

282 points · 342 comments · Danhale93

  1. estearum · · focus · HN ↗
    (speaking from US): The reality is we need more doctors. A lot more.

    There's no solution other than training a lot, lot, lot, lot more doctors.

    Their salaries need to be lower, training needs to be cheaper and faster, and we need a lot more of them.

    1. rolisz · · focus · HN ↗
      Are you sure you can find that many more doctors? That they'll be any good?

      Speaking from Romania: here medicine is prestigious. So many parents push their kids towards medicine. There's a glut of newly minted doctors every year, but rumour has it that the quality drops every year. Sure, they pass the exams and residency and what not, but... They're just not into medicine as much.

      Do you want to get treated by such a person?

      This year I had to go to a neurologist. I went to one locally, they dismissed me in 5 minutes, told me to take some vitamins basically. Went to another one in a much bigger city, they talked to me for an hour, ordered a ton of tests.

      Would it help if we get a lot more of the first kind of doctors?

      1. lolakutty · · focus · HN ↗
        Yea, that is what is going to happen.

        Earlier you just need to find a doctor and they were probably good. Now you have to take your luck with many till you find a good one (if you are still alive by then)..

        I don't know why people think that they can mass produce competence..

        1. vladms · · focus · HN ↗
          You can mass produce anything, but it has a cost.

          I have the impression that some people imagine that you can produce now 10x more doctors at the same cost that you were producing one doctor 10 years ago. Mostly because some tasks (even programming) got many times "more efficient" I feel people transfer to easy to other topics.

          Even worse, education expenditure is decreasing for many countries! (see some examples: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;education-spending?tab=line&amp;country=USA%7EROU%7ENLD%7EJPN&amp;spending_type=gdp_share&amp;level=all" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;grapher&#x2F;education-spending?tab=li...)

        2. nradov · · focus · HN ↗
          There have always been a lot of incompetent and even dangerous doctors. It&#x27;s just that patients weren&#x27;t aware of this and tended to trust their doctor even when the actual care quality was terrible.
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