What I don't get is why the law insists that someone who has $250k and 10 years (meaning, 10 years of no income that they're trying to amortize on top of their already amortizing school loans) of school to read a couple of numbers and say "yep, you're fine".
The law doesn't say anything. You can read the results yourself and trust that you didn't miss anything. (Your doctor, unless he's a moron, goes to another doctor for his checkup.)
My niece has had medical training, years of it. So when her mom was dying last spring and summer, and when my wife, her aunt, had a stroke before Christmas, she wanted to see all the results and consult with all the doctors. Since she understood everything they said, and didn't ask "layman" questions, none of them objected. But she has the training. I understood most of it, having had to learn a lot to write medical software, but after a doctor left, in many cases, I still had to ask her to explain what significance something had.
Me? I had cold sweats back in 97. The head of HR insisted on calling an ambulance and sending me to the hospital. They took blood and read some enzyme levels. My doctor can't read computer code in split octal and I can't read enzyme levels. But I can write a program in machine code, and he could tell from my enzyme levels that I had suffered a silent myocardial infarc - a piece of my heart muscle had died.
That's why he has an MD and I have an EE. (They didn't teach programming when I was in school - we were still on vacuum tubes.)
I don't care whether the government insists on the man looking at my lab results has that level of training, *I* insist on it. I don't want overlooked bugs killing my cellphone and I don't want one killing me.
Sure, if the numbers are bad, then bring in the doctor to discuss options, but there's no reason to bring in (or pay) big guns for normal readings.
But do you know what combination of readings is "normal"? Jim Fixx (this may be urban legend, but It's what I've heard) had an abnormally low blood pressure - but abnormally large veins and arteries, so it didn't take a lot of pressure to push a large volume of blood through his body.
My blood sugar is abnormally low for a diabetic.
If you have the training to understand how all the numbers affect each other, pay $25 for a lab test and diagnose yourself, but even most internists won't do that. "An attorney who represents himself has a fool for a client." So does a doctor who diagnoses himself.
Prostate and colon cancer scare me (because they tend to be asymptomatic until they're a problem), and he said that a 32 year old doesn't need those tests. Diabetes scares me but we've covered that. Full disclosure, I had a colonoscopy last year for non cancer reasons.
But that's the same kind of thing you just had - they looked at you. That's all a colonoscopy is. (Sure doesn't feel like it, but that's all it is, unless they snipped off a few polyps.)
I never take my car in to just "have it checked out". I always have a specific reason. I change my own oil and air filters, too.
You're qualified to. Are you qualified to determine whether a hemoglobin A1C of 7 is normal for you?
TANSTAAFL. I may not pay for it, but someone pays.
Yep. The insurance company pays - so that instead of paying for part of a heart transplant operation when your heart is 80% fat, they pay a few bucks for a cholesterol test now, and can tell you to change your diet if your LDL is over 200.
And if I pay someone to pay someone to pay the doc, is the system not just a little crazy for encouraging me to do it that way?
Why pay for fire insurance on your house? So few houses burn down that it's pretty much money thrown away, isn't it?
More of the same, really. The reason a doctor can look at the lab results for 2 minutes and know how you're feeling better than you know yourself is that he went to school for 10 years (and spent years of training in a hospital, and still goes to seminars and ... keeps up with things is what it is). You'd have to spend 3 hours going over the web, finding out how this affects that, and if it's bad if the other is that value and ...
I have high cholesterol (generated internally - it stays high if I'm on a pure vegetable diet) and gout. The best meds for those conditions are contraindicated together. The gout medication (don't get me started on what a ripoff it is to allow a company to do a meta-study on a generic and get the right to have it not be a generic any longer) interacts with any statin and can cause major problems. So either a heart attack or pain so bad that I lay in bed all night screaming?
That guy who's so overpaid (my doctor at the time) researched the situation, including with some very good pharmacologists, and came up with a course of medication that continues, years later, to keep the gout just about non-existent, while I'm still on a statin.
When my spinal arthritis had me wondering if living was worth the effort any more (about 2 months ago), one of those overpaid doctors spent half an hour working with a pharmacist to find some way to relieve the pain. Opiates have only one effect on me - if I take them with water I get a bit of hydration. I could have taken codeine until it stopped my breathing, and I would have died, still in agony. Can't take most other meds that would have worked, for other reasons.
But - I don't know where she got this one - many people who get no effect from codeine and opiates (some kind of northern European genetic heritage) get great relief from a combination of a very mild pain killer (the kind that would slightly take the edge off a mild headache) and a very low dosage of Valium. Works like a shot of pure morphine for me.
Are there doctors not worth the paper their degree is printed on? Sure. Just ask anyone who uses the VA for medical care. But there are doctors who are worth all the money they can carry in a large truck. The one who sees something in your blood test when you're 35 that causes you to be above ground on your 36th birthday is one of those. And that's why the insurance company pays doctors what Cisco pays good programmers - because "change your diet and take this prescription" saves the insurance company hundreds of millions of dollars every year. (And it would save them more if more people DID what the doctor recommended.) And it keeps your rates lower too. If they had to pay millions more, you'd be paying hundreds or thousands more.
They're in the business for only ONE thing - to make a profit. And they have people they pay good salaries to, to figure out how to do that. So if they're paying for an annual physical you can be sure that your taking an annual physical is saving them money, statistically. And if it can't hurt your health, what's bad about it? They win, you win or break even.
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The labwork could have found the cancer early enough to be treatable. I have them now, really because my job requires them as I'm over 50, and one never knows what they might find.
