It’s easy not to trust a system associated with charging you $500 for Tylenol. Much easier (and occasionally even safer) to just smell some lavender and hope that helps. Go to an ED and you could just die of a stroke or heart attack in the waiting room or even get run over by somebody who died of a heart attack while driving and just plowed through the waiting room because they couldn’t afford an ambulance. And the Healthcare system is largely failing because of insurance companies. Burn inhumana and united quacks to the ground 2k24.
Edit: also housing. Fix the housing crisis and the Healthcare system could probably pull through despite the odds. There’s a huge number of homeless people that just live in hospitals, especially psych wards and I’m not even kidding.
This is a terrible take. Advertising medicine makes a ton of sense. People don’t always know what symptoms are actually something that has a cure. They see an ad for a drug and think “oh shit, I have those symptoms, let me go the to doctor”. Otherwise they just live with what they think is normal.
But further, DOCTORS don’t even know what new drugs exist. Patients advocating for themselves is a HUGE benefit. So a patient might come in and ask for a drug that the doctor has never even heard of so never would have even considered prescribing it even if it was the right drug.
I think you have the terrible take. Untrained people shouldn’t be self-diagnosing based on hearing a list of symptoms, the brain is too good at tricking itself and it is too easy to even give yourself symptoms you don’t have.
And I don’t expect any one doctor to know of every treatment that exists for every illness, because that’s what collaborative knowledge bases are for. A carefully moderated medical Wikipedia that can be contributed to by doctors and researchers.
But all of this wouldn’t make the pharmesutical companies as much money as peddling to hypochondriacs so instead we have ads.
At the end of the day the doctor is the one who does the research. A doctor may recommend something else instead if they don’t think a drug is a good fit.
This is literally what everyone does. How else would it possibly even work? “Oh shit you mean my foot numbness is a symptom of diabetes?”. Like, this is just how human interaction works.
What does this have to do with what we’re talking about. Are you saying that the doctor should just input every symptom that every patient gives them to a medical Wikipedia? Because otherwise how would they know of new drugs? They may think they know exactly how to treat whatever symptom, but if they’re not continually looking it up very single time, they’ll miss new meds.
What you described is not even remotely a solution to the actual problem of 1. people not knowing their symptoms are potentially from a disease that has a treatment. and 2. doctors knowing that treatment exists