I have had nothing but bad experiences with the medical profession. I started feeling unwell around 1980 in my early 30s, becoming a lot worse around 1994, forcing me to stop work for the first time. At that time, I started seeing doctors about the problem, but in all of the years since, not one of those doctors could be bothered to do the work necessary to find the cause of my health problems.
Quite apart from the problems with funding, federal and state governments, health management, etc., there are serious fundamental problems within the medical profession itself, from the suburban General Practitioner right up to Professors of Medicine at our largest teaching hospitals and universities. There are problems with the way that medicine is practiced in Australia, and probably other countries where medicine is a business.
The most fundamental and pervasive problem stems from the process of selecting people to study medicine and the system that educates our doctors.
The way that medical services are delivered, The ‘consultation’ business model.
Self-protection by the sub-sub-sub-specialisation of the profession.
Approaching the problem from the wrong direction, The disease-label approach.
The compartmentalisation of symptoms.
The last resort of the incompetent, amateur psychiatry.
The quite-undeserved arrogance and self-importance of the profession.
And finally, just a few of the bad experiences that I’ve had with the medical profession.
“Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.” Voltaire