As someone with a few autoimmune disorders, the most effective way to assess a doctor is to see if they talk with you or at you. If they talk at you during the first appointment, it’s best to cut em loose and keep looking until you find one who talks with you. This, along with having a decent knowledge base of the topic at hand, prevents you from having a power tripping M.D. and also makes getting proper medical attention much easier!

🤪 Collective action to bring about socialized medicine? I sleep. Anarchistic means to reduce dependency? what is that?

Idea. In order to not get stuck in this power struggle, let’s engineer a patient separatist movement, where we begin to decenter medical institutions! We tell patients that they don’t actually need the care to begin with. If they cling on, we chastise them with new vocabulary! Teehee!

There’s a power imbalance between insurance companies and the insured. Dr. Says you need x, insurance company says no you don’t.

Yes, absolutely. I’ve been with my mom to many doctor’s appointments for various things, usually pain of some kind.

Literally every time we’ve gone, they take maybe 5 minutes out of their day to pop in the exam room, give her a once-over up and down, then ask a couple questions and prescribe a bullshit medication that literally doesn’t work. It’s just throwing money down the drain at this point.

And I know it’s location-dependent. A couple years ago she was traveling out of state to California and had to go to a doctor for something while she was out there. She told me the difference between Midwest and West Coast healthcare is almost literally might and day.

I don’t really understand the question but if we keep it simple, medical care providers are trained to provide healthcare while most patients are not. That seems like a power imbalance from inception.

Patients can refuse treatment and go to different medical providers but do the providers really care? They have a crammed schedule and see patients for like 10 minutes.

Did you mean to post this on shittyasklemmy?

This answer only applies to the nightmare hellscape of American healthcare.

Absolutely. Patients can’t argue against care in an informed way and have no way to navigate to affordable and effective care. Each mistake costs more time, money, and sometimes health consequences.

Medical care provider delays, doesn’t commit, doesn’t care or just makes a mistake? Costs them nothing at all. Get billed. That medication didn’t work for you? Here try another one. Don’t agree? Get a referral and get another bill. Don’t like me? Doesn’t matter. Not like you picked me as a doctor because of my reputation. If you go with someone else the clinic will assign some other patient to me that won’t be as picky or know better

This shouldn’t be a power struggle. It’s not zero-sum.