What has always bothered me is that you pay the medical profession for EFFORTS, not RESULTS.
The medical profession justifies this by saying that they are working with the most complex organism yet devised. That's true enough, but when you look at how much data is available on the human body from the studies done, all of the difficult work was done by researchers and does not need to be reinvented every trip to the doctor's office.
This may be a gross oversimplification, but it seems to me that most problems are either so simple that a lesser qualified person (physicians assistant) could solve the problem, or so complex that the average physician is useless. For these more complex problems, I think the answer is increasing use of software driven diagnoses. For instance, I get more information on my problems sitting at home, typing my symptoms into Google, than I get from the best doctors I can find (and Houston has some good ones). I think with the increasing complexity of medicine, physicians, as they are currently deployed, are now an anachronism.
As far as doing something - My suggestion would be to start taking seriously the idea of class warfare and economic slavery. In my mental model we are well on our way to being slaves to the moneyed class. You don't need a militarized society to have slavery. They have already subjugated us through coopting the government into being their "enforcer", while they bombard us with propaganda about freedom and democracy. If you want to find an immediate cause of your problems, think about government collusion with the American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical companies.
[ October 15, 2004, 01:51 PM: Message edited by: TooManyWheels ]
The medical profession justifies this by saying that they are working with the most complex organism yet devised. That's true enough, but when you look at how much data is available on the human body from the studies done, all of the difficult work was done by researchers and does not need to be reinvented every trip to the doctor's office.
This may be a gross oversimplification, but it seems to me that most problems are either so simple that a lesser qualified person (physicians assistant) could solve the problem, or so complex that the average physician is useless. For these more complex problems, I think the answer is increasing use of software driven diagnoses. For instance, I get more information on my problems sitting at home, typing my symptoms into Google, than I get from the best doctors I can find (and Houston has some good ones). I think with the increasing complexity of medicine, physicians, as they are currently deployed, are now an anachronism.
As far as doing something - My suggestion would be to start taking seriously the idea of class warfare and economic slavery. In my mental model we are well on our way to being slaves to the moneyed class. You don't need a militarized society to have slavery. They have already subjugated us through coopting the government into being their "enforcer", while they bombard us with propaganda about freedom and democracy. If you want to find an immediate cause of your problems, think about government collusion with the American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical companies.
[ October 15, 2004, 01:51 PM: Message edited by: TooManyWheels ]