Is there really any point of doctors in the modern era?

This reminds me of an LRC classic that captures the mentality of many of the posters here….

theonion.com

I'm Not One Of Those Fancy College-Educated Doctors

Dr. Mike Ruddy

I'm a doctor, and I'm damn good at it. Why? Because I learned to be a doctor the old-fashioned way: gumption, elbow grease, and trial and error. I'm not one of these blowhards in a white coat who'll wear your ears out with 10...

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This! We need AI that replaces MBAs, MHAs, billers / coders, and all sales people everywhere. Let’s make healthcare great again!

Scheming doctors are denying us medbeds, which cure just about all ailments and diseases known and unknown to patriotic Americans and right-minded foreigners. Look it up! It will save your life!

Best thing about AI is that very soon all those microsoft jobs will disappear, having being outsourced to AI in the cloud. No more massive tech crashes. And all their seattle employees can join the great unwashed in the streets of seattle homeless/revolutionary camps. Less time pom their hands, but no money for internet access. That will really clean up these boards.

Well there's far less need for running coaches. You can just look up everything on the internet etc...

Yes. Need someone to blame when things go sideways.

Truth is both doctors and CPAs are largely (but not entirely) dispensable as AI evolves.

I’m not ready to stop going to the doctor, but I do use mine less, in part became my insurance sucks. Because every visit costs me a lot, I’ll do a little research before going in. For example, I found I can get blood work done (at a certified lab my clinic uses) for less than 1/10 of what my clinic bills for the same tests, so if I have a hunch they might order work on something that I’m dealing with, I go ahead and order it myself before my appointment. I get that they need to make a profit, but a 10-fold markup on blood tests seems crazy to me. I trust my clinic to look after my health, but I have a harder time trusting them with my money. The thing is, I might be OK doing my blood work through them, despite the up-charge. But when I called the clinic about the pricing, they were super evasive and unhelpful. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something - like, are there any advantages to doing these tests through the clinic? If so, cool, let's do it. But I just got the old "I'm sorry I don't have that information." But despite not "having that information," you are cool with taking hundreds (or thousands) of dollars from me? I'm feeling sick, lol.

Same, would love an AI doctor for primary care.

Let’s settle this debate by seeing which one of the doctor or CPA can do more pushups.

I suppose I could have asked the guy working behind the counter at the 7-Eleven to perform my (direct anterior) hip replacement surgeries, but for some reason I opted for a highly-experienced orthopedic surgeon.

Silly me. What was I thinking?

Entire field? I like my CPA and not just because he's helped me save a lot of money. He also answers basic questions without generating CPT codes (and another bill) so I feel free to chat when I have an issue. I wouldn't want to trade places with him during tax season, but he's into the outdoors and during some months he's able to spend a lot of time on the water.

I don’t know that individual doctors are any more evil or more kind than anyone else.

I DO believe that the incentives of the medical profession are a mess.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal over 20 years ago. It highlighted UPMC’s profitable choice to hire a doctor who promised to double the number of liver transplants that the hospital was doing. Think about it — how do you double your revenues of liver transplants, all other things being equal? A couple ways: recommend liver transplants for people with compromised liver functioning, but not yet in liver failure. Another factor: they did it by using donor livers that were below the normal acceptable standards of the day.

This made UPMC a lot of money, and that was the point. Perform more procedures, rake in more profits. Not acting in the patients best interests, but hey, profit is the name of the game, right?

Another example from the news 20 years ago, there were two court cases in which oncology practices weren’t generating the revenue the wanted to be generating. Of course, the easiest solution was to tell some of their patients that the cancer was back, and that they required another stretch of chemotherapy. Of course, they told this to people whose cancer wasn’t back. There were two cases in the newspaper article I read — I remember one was a doctor in Michigan. The point was, doctors are in an incentive structure to perform more profitable services, whether this is in their patients best interests or not.

On the larger scale, it is totally obvious that nobody’s looking out for the health of Americans. As a nation, we’re paying more than any other nation for our doctors and our hospitals, and our health as a nation is in the toilet.

I’m sure some people start studying medicine because they want to help regular people, but they just become part of the system. And the system is about making money, not about healing and not about prevention and certainly not about giving Americans the most amount of health for the least amount of money. (That last one’s a real laugh!=

All you pro-quacks are engaging in strawman arguments. Of course you can't do a heart transplant on yourself.

But what you can easily do is draw a tube of our own blood. And if you don't want to do that, what you should be able to do is go to Target or CVS or even Bob's Discount Blood Center if you want to and have someone draw some blood, stick in a test machine, and email you the results so you can cut and paste them into whatever online algorithm doctors use to tell you that you whether you need statins or Metamucil or a bucket of Geritol or Ivermectin or whatever the hell else. Same drill with an EKG or an echocardiogram if your heart's bothering you, or an X-ray or an MRI or whatever other test you want. Same drill with a vaccine or an IV or dozens of other things. There is absolutely no legitimate reason you should need to see a doctor (or anyone really) to do that stuff or any of enormous amounts of other procedures, test and analysis.

If those options were available to you -- and the ONLY reason they aren't is because the medical profession won't let them be available -- you would save yourself the following:

Time - no more showing up for your appointment at 3 and being shuffled around various rooms doing nothing before some arrogant pr!ck comes in 20 minutes late and spend a minute with you doing nothing you couldn't do yourself, and rescheduling the next BS for three months down the road.

Emotions - no more listening to smug, judgmental jerks (see the doctor posting in this thread) who think they are better than you and scorn you. No more receptionists who can barely give you the time of day telling you to fill out the same fvcking form you filled out the last time you waited around there. No more assistants treating you like an idiot. No more getting jerked around and treated like a nuisance by everyone in the office when you're in an anxious mood to begin with.

Privacy - every freaking impression, note and test they do -- much of which is totally unneeded for any medical reason -- is "on your permanent record." Which means its readily available to (1) every insurance company in America, (2) every medical outfit in America, (3) your employer(s), (4) local, state and federal government and (5) anyone who sues the medical outfit you are at for anything. You are absolutely kidding yourself if you think any of that is not true. You leave the doctor's office and your record is emailed, download, stored, printed, and posted pretty much everywhere you've always suspected it was. I've been involved in various litigation matters for various companies, and I can tell you that you would not believe the amount of medical records they have lying around on employees. Your boss has access to every encounter you have had with the medical profession since you started under the company's health insurance plan.

Better treatment - you can read the blood test, etc. and plug in the numbers into an internet algorithm just as easy as they can. You can read articles about symptoms and figure out what tests you want as well as they can. Better, in fact. You are motivated by your own health, they are motivated by money and power. You have time to think, they are working a volume assembly line trying to get customers in and out.

Money - go back and read your last doctor bill. Then shake your head and wonder if you actually needed all that stuff or whether it would have been A LOT cheaper if you were allowed to just do it yourself.

Anyone who really wants to be a doctor should join the army and be a combat medic.

Jeffrey Dahmer did.

I think you just like saying "statins"

You think the hospital runs on moonbeams and unicorn farts?

This is what I love about the Philippines. Know something is wrong, go in and discuss it with the doc. Convo basically consists of "i think I have this, I need this" Lasts 5 minutes. Walk out with script of anything non-narcotic for $10 (sometimes not even that). Go to Mercury Drug and pic up.

One time I was running a fever of 103. I went to Don Honario hospital. Went right in, no line, consult, blood test in only a few minutes. Determined bacterial sinus infection (from swiming at Mt Arayat). Got some anti-biotics. 30 minutes and $70 all in.

The Philippines has this stuff figured out. They should be the world model for health care. Of course they don't have shanequas and tardos swamping them with every stupid thing, making a scene, trashing the place and making stupid demands. And they don't have millions of frivolous lawsuits to deal with. That streamlines things I guess.

10/10 OP