"Are you sure you can find that many more doctors? That they'll be any good? Speaking from Romania: ..."

The prior post was specifically talking about the US. (I assure you, arrogant dismissive doctors are also a thing in the US)

In the US, there are a number of things that artificially increase the barriers to becoming a doctor.

1) You typically need a four year college degree to apply to medical school

2) Medical schools are accredited by the AMA, which is controlled by doctors. The AMA makes it very difficult to start a new MD-granting medical school.

3) Medical school in the US is very competitive to get in. They are likely turning away a lot of people who could complete the degree.

4) Since 1997, the federal government has a fixed number of Medicare (Medicare is a federal health insurance program for people over 65) supported residency positions. That number was basically flat for 25 years. We lost about 20% per capita of doctors being trained with support from this program. The caveat to this is that the total number of residents per capita has increased over time, particularly the past 15 years or so. My understanding is that they are less likely to be fully funded, so they spend more money getting trained, and then have higher students loans (on average graduating with debt above 200k going back to the late 2000s) that they need to pay off, so they charge more.

And you can add to this that it can be very difficult to be a doctor in another country and come to the US to practice here.

I'd like not to have to wait for three months to see a doctor to prescribe me the routine treatment for my routine illness, so yes, more mediocre doctors would be good for me. It would also unburden the doctors who are "really into medicine" so that they could spend their time on more difficult cases.

Hate to be cynical, but going by the stories a doctor in my personal circles tells me, "talked to me for an hour, ordered a ton of tests" could be more about billing the national healthcare fund for many tests, that may not be most useful, but carry best margins for the facility.

In my country, there's a big feud between cardiologists and radiologists right now, big enough to be a regular topic in national media. Inside sources tell me it has nothing to do with quality of care, and is entirely about the march of technology allowing radiologists to perform some diagnostics that previously required cardiological procedures, and those procedures happened to be the major funding source for the cardiology departments.

You get the same problems in the US with the attitudes of doctors.

In the US, medical school is extremely expensive (like $400,000 expensive). There are many people who are excellent doctors who are just priced out of the profession. If we could make medical school less expensive (by subsidizing it and by reducing the amount of instruction), we would probably get many more excellent doctors.

> Would it help if we get a lot more of the first kind of doctors?

Hard to tell when you don't let us know which of those doctors ended up solving the issues that made you seek a doctor.

Dismissive doctors are bad but so are those that waste your time and risk complications from unnecessary invasive tests.

> Would it help if we get a lot more of the first kind of doctors?

Depends? Did the tests actually find anything, or did they just make you feel better?

I had a talk with my GP about this at some point, and he more or less told me that he can just say "Go home, rest, come back in two weeks if it doesn't get better.", and 95% of the time that'll be exactly what is necessary. The hard part of his job is figuring out which of the visits are those 5%.

So you're saying limiting the number of doctors work better?

Speaking from Poland, we see the same outcome: doctors rushing patients out after 5 minutes. The reasons may be different, though: since COVID, many doctors here have, in my view, become more arrogant and focused on money. Over the past few months, an uproar over doctors’ pay has swept through Polish social media.

Reports have emerged of doctors billing for overlapping work under multiple contracts. In one case, a doctor’s records showed 72 hours of work in a single day!

Meanwhile, the Polish Chamber of Physicians and Dentists (NIL) continues to defend caps on medical school admissions, adding fuel to the national debate.

We do have qualified people to do the work of doctors, and they're called nurses. But arbitrary lines are drawn between what they can do and what doctors can do, just to maintain the existing salary structure.

I work in a med lab in Romania. I'm doing some of that "ton of tests" your doctor ordered. 99.9% is money wasted - your money I bet.

This is another one of those "kids these days" thing based on nothing but vibes. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916

I'll give you some N=1 sample on older doctors since I'm also from Romania: a lot of these older doctors haven't opened a book in a very long time and are still using older practices instead of providing their patients with the latest and most effective treatments available because they're too lazy and/or prestigious to go and learn new things. Would you say that they "into medicine"?

> Would it help if we get a lot more of the first kind of doctors?

It would certainly help hypochondriacs a lot. Ordering "a ton of tests" needs to have some basis behind it, and doing it just to make the patient "feel seen" is not a great way to do your profession. People being dismissed quickly also happens in the US quite a lot, sometimes with disastrous results though it's not incredibly common, it's typically labeled under "diagnostic error" https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/23/9/727.long

Maybe I would rather be treated by such a doctor with time on their hands than a burned out brilliant doctor?

Yea, that is what is going to happen.

Earlier you just need to find a doctor and they were probably good. Now you have to take your luck with many till you find a good one (if you are still alive by then)..

I don't know why people think that they can mass produce competence..

Ah yes and when doctors give everyone expensive tests because the patients are a bunch of drama queens who think they know better because they have a doctorate in Google the costs go up.