I’m in biomedical engineering and I spend a decent amount of time trying to understand the psychology of doctors and the behavior of the medical system. I am curious—in your odyssey, what is the maximum number of visits that you had with any one doctor?
The reason I ask is that it loosely appears to me that, if the condition isn’t life-threatening, many doctors act as if they only expect to see us once. They send us home to recover on our own, perhaps with a few self-care tips, or with a diagnosis and a referral. There isn’t a single person qualified to diagnose and prescribe who “owns the ball” for your condition. There’s a clinic called the Lanby (launched by the wife of the author of waitbutwhy, which has a writeup on their business model) in which you’re seen by the same provider at every visit, and where your annual membership covers an unlimited number of visits. It’s $325/month which is much more than I, for one, spend on healthcare annually, and it’s not a replacement for health insurance, but this incentive structure seems to me like it would motivate doctors to actually help their patients get well efficiently. I’d be curious to know how they’ve fared in the couple years since the writeup.
Yeah, a big part of the problem was expert ping-pong. I only saw one doctor twice. It’s part of the global dysfunction I observed. Because of that, I have been seriously considering signing up for concierge medicine, which has a similar business model to what you describe above.
Concierge medicine is definitely a good general keyword for people to know about if they have, or may one day develop, a chronic mystery medical condition. Virginia Mason Franciscan describes their version in a way that makes it sound specifically designed for your sort of issue. A recent article I found says it can be obtained for as little as $1200/year, but it sounds like about $3000/year might be a more typical price.
I’m in biomedical engineering and I spend a decent amount of time trying to understand the psychology of doctors and the behavior of the medical system. I am curious—in your odyssey, what is the maximum number of visits that you had with any one doctor?
The reason I ask is that it loosely appears to me that, if the condition isn’t life-threatening, many doctors act as if they only expect to see us once. They send us home to recover on our own, perhaps with a few self-care tips, or with a diagnosis and a referral. There isn’t a single person qualified to diagnose and prescribe who “owns the ball” for your condition. There’s a clinic called the Lanby (launched by the wife of the author of waitbutwhy, which has a writeup on their business model) in which you’re seen by the same provider at every visit, and where your annual membership covers an unlimited number of visits. It’s $325/month which is much more than I, for one, spend on healthcare annually, and it’s not a replacement for health insurance, but this incentive structure seems to me like it would motivate doctors to actually help their patients get well efficiently. I’d be curious to know how they’ve fared in the couple years since the writeup.
Yeah, a big part of the problem was expert ping-pong. I only saw one doctor twice. It’s part of the global dysfunction I observed. Because of that, I have been seriously considering signing up for concierge medicine, which has a similar business model to what you describe above.
Concierge medicine is definitely a good general keyword for people to know about if they have, or may one day develop, a chronic mystery medical condition. Virginia Mason Franciscan describes their version in a way that makes it sound specifically designed for your sort of issue. A recent article I found says it can be obtained for as little as $1200/year, but it sounds like about $3000/year might be a more typical price.