Stellula
6d ago
Again, I am not a doctor. The response I am giving here is essentially me echoing the response I've gotten from telling this story to my doctor friends/family. Basically: "You had a fever for a week, you tested negative for the few viral things they tested for, and they didn't want to explore it further at all or put you on an antibiotic as a precaution?"
Maybe that's wrong. I don't know! What I do know is that "the only people who should be able to tell you anything about this have to make $250k/yr at a minimum, and have to have a seemingly endless number of administrators around them" seems outrageously inefficient to me. Maybe it's not!
My insurance changed last month, my PCP is no longer “in network” and the wait to get into a new one is long, which is why I was at UC. I did go to me “PCP” (a concierge group). That was the second doctor, which I paid cash for. As the symptoms worsened I could have gone back to them again, I guess. However when I was there, they seemed almost offended that I was because my insurance wasn’t usable to them. One reason the doctor said she didn’t want to do any tests (and tried to just get me to go to CVS for the Covid test instead of doing it there) was that my insurance wouldnt cover any of them.
So; just more ridiculous inefficiency in the inefficient healthcare system.
Kind of a meta point here, but I think you’re demonstrating maybe my exact frustration. You assume I’m stupid and don’t know how the system is supposed to work, or that I’m trying to abuse it in some way. I’m assuring you: I do know how it is supposed to work and I’m trying to use it correctly. It’s just that the system does suck
Stellula
6d ago
Patients will always ask for antibiotics even if we know in advance the issue is viral and antibiotics won't do anything, and that's not counting the goal of abx stewardship, or just minimizing side effect burden. No medications are safe, if you give everyone in the country a full course of antibiotics people are going to lose their kidneys, have joins explode, or just flat out die.
I was making a general point about the inefficiency of the healthcare system, but to address these point specifically:
I didn't ask for antibiotics. I was trying to do things exactly the way you are advocating here. I didn't just get antibiotics, I did go to the doctor four times, and the first 3 of them did essentially nothing. The first one had this interaction:
Do you have a fever?
Well yes, but I'm controlling it with tylenol every 4 hours.
So you don't have a fever?
Well if I stop taking the tylenol, my temperate goes over 102, so I keep on the tylenol and have been for a week.
Okay but your temperature is reading normal right now, it's not showing a fever.
Yes but like I said, I have been taking tylenol regularly to manage the fever, which I have now had for a full week.
Okay so no fever.
The second one was this interaction
Hi I've had a fever for a week and a half now, and the first person I saw said that if it didn't go away, to see my PCP, which is you.
Okay? You probably have a virus
Okay yes but is there anything else we could check for?
I guess I can give you a covid test if you want me to.
I'm asking you for your opinion here? I'm not a doctor, but I've never been this sick for this long before and it's got me concerned.
Okay a covid test I guess?
Sure?
The third one was a telehealth visit, literally not even a video just a text message with a doctor (maybe?)
The fourth was:
Hello I am now on week 3 of some sort of illness, the first week and a half was a 102+ fever, and now I have a sore throat that started one one side of my throat and then over a couple of days moved to both. I am having difficulty swallowing, and if you look deeply into my throat, you'll see it's covered in quite a few tiny white spots.
Those are tonsil stones
No I know what you're talking about, but to see what I'm talking about, you really would need a scope. I could only see the spots I'm talking about using a boroscope, and they're pretty deep inside my throat.
No i can see those from here, the two white spots at the back are tonsil stones
No, I mean a lot deeper than that.
Yeah I see it. Those are tonsil stones
etc.
Yeah probably a viral thing -> weakened immune system -> bacterial infection/secondary viral infection, and anti-biotics were a coincidence. My general point is that this entire escapade is only made worse by gatekeeping healthcare. Offhand I can think of 6 different doctors with different specialities in my very close family circle (either my siblings, or godparents of my kids), and all of them would easily just let me call them and give me recommendations on what do to while I'm sick. The point I'm making here is that I didn't do that, because I was just trying to use the healthcare system as prescribed, and that i was an inefficient joke.
Stellula
7d ago
Well first of all the family member is a doctor (just not a family doctor), and second: how does the doctor know? Are they given secret knowledge that is inaccessible to mere humans?
Doctors aren’t priests. The stuff that 90% of PCPs are doing could be replaced by a flow chart. As far as antibiotic stewardship, when China and India and Brazil and everybody else gets on board, maybe.
Stellula
7d ago
The parasites in this situation are the health insurance companies, and to a lesser degree, the actual providers.
I was recently sick, and it took four different doctor visits before somebody just gave me the antibiotics which fixed whatever problem I was having. The first one, an "urgent care" told me to just rest and hydrate. The second, my PCP, gave me a covid test, said that it was negative, shrugged, and said R&H, the third (telehealth) gave me a useless antibiotic and did no testing. The fourth, another UC, gave me a strep test, a mono test, and then some steroids and antibiotics.
This is retarded. A family member, when I was first complaining about being sick, offered to just write me a prescription for the cocktail of drugs he takes when he starts feeling sick, but me being a good little boy said I wanted to go see a doctor.
This should have been a 2 minute long discussion with a pharmacist at most where I tell them what drugs I want, then half an hour at my local lab where they do a few tests for me, and that's it.
As it is, with the retarded "health" cartel, there was probably thousands of dollars of useless waste spent on useless doctors and useless nurses performing useless tests (covid? Really? Flu?). Their goal is to gatekeep as many things as possible behind absurdly expensive gates, then when costs go to infinity, they demand the government subsidize them.
The couple you talk about in the beginning of this post suck, but so does the industry they're sucking.
As usual this is all made a lot worse when the government subsidises all of it.
Stellula
12d ago
I like it! My only request is that we build a giant dedicated building for it, preferably so tall that you can't see the top from the bottom, and give whoever is taking a turn speaking a levitating platform to stand on that can move around the chamber while they talk.
Joking aside (although I do really like the idea at first), how would various committees work? Just equally large?
Stellula
13d ago
I think you got it! Thanks!
Btw everybody here’s the patreon: https://www.patreon.com/themotte
Stellula
24d ago
E-collars are extremely common for people with dogs and land, especially people with hunting dogs.
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/outdoor-recreation/sporting-dog-tracking-training-devices/
Stellula
24d ago
It's completely mainstream to use e-collars for pets, but not like this.
The typical use for an e-collar is for recall, and there are multiple levels to it.
- Noise (it beeps)
- Vibe (it vibrates)
- Shock
You use these when you issue the recall command (usually: "come!") but the dog is too fixated on something to respond. You start by doing the beeps, then the vibe, and then only if the dog is totally locked into something would you use the shock. The shock isn't a punishment, it's just there to get the dogs attention.
There are people who use the shock as punishment, but they're the minority.
Is it lost on everybody that he was basically quoting the office? As in: the most normie of normie network tv shows from the early 2000s?
The quote “if I was in a room with Hitler, Bin Laden, and Toby, and I only had two bullets, I would shoot Toby twice.”
These were private text messages. He was trying to be funny. I don’t think this is in any way an indication of some secret desire to kill anybody, the jokes just weren’t landing.
I really hate this trend of taking conversations from one context, putting them into another context, and pretending that the person meant something they didn’t.
It was the same two weeks ago with libs hyperventilating over Trump saying “I hate my enemies”, just clearly him trying to be funny, and not the major escalation people seemed to want it to be.
Just absolutely stupid rage searching. This is nothing. There are plenty of examples of libs engaging in legitimately dangerous speech, like publicly calling Trump and his supporters “fascists” and “Nazis”, for instance. This was a guy having a private conversation that should have stayed private.
Also: it shouldn’t be lost on the people here that none of us are posting with our full names. The point of a place like this is to be able to pick up an idea and argue it even if you don’t agree with it. If somebody doxxed everybody here, and implied this was their true beliefs that they keep hidden, would they be right? (I don’t think so). The same is true of a private text message chain.
We are arguing the exact same thing now. The people who are talking to those people should NOT be the person I am talking to for a fever and a sore throat. Thats the absurd inefficiency.
I basically need to talk to a pharmacist, not a doctor.
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