https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis
> In 2013, an estimated 142,000 persons died from adverse effects of medical treatment, up from an estimated 94,000 in 1990.
Careful what you wish for!
And, imo, an awful lot of deaths are due to issues that cannot be classified as caused by doctors - eg dosage error over time, something that mitigates symptoms but allows the underlying to deteriorate, etc.
I simply don’t think we have the medical knowledge necessary yet to know what the “right” number of health care professionals is.
Yes, unfortunately we've made doctors the gatekeepers and they don't want more doctors because that will eat into their income. This happens with every single licensed occupation where the license body is run by members of the occupation, with the possible exception of bar associations.
My theory on that one is that the more lawyers you have in society the more lawyers you need because lawyers do a great job creating work for one another (both through litigation but also through legal documentation which needs to be read and interpreted by other lawyers).
They currently have a senate bill to increase funding and incentivize the most needed specialties (GP and psych). We'll see how that goes. At this point, it feels like interest in being a doctor has diminished - there's too much training, many specialties don't pay well enough to justify the delayed earnings and costs, the hours can be miserable, and it's a nightmare to deal with all the regulations and legal aspects.
No, that’s the proximate issue. The main issue is the requirement of residencies for all doctors in the first place. In particular, I’m referring to doctors from other countries who may have years or even decades of experience practicing medicine being required to compete for residency spots. These doctors infamously end up driving for Uber instead of practicing medicine.
Contrast that to my cousin who moved to Australia and was quickly accepted as a practicing physician.
We can expand US MD and US DO schools and fill our thousands of unfilled Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Pediatric Subspecialty residency slots first!
It’s the tyranny of the status quo. Milton Friedman was complaining about this more than 50 years ago.
Perhaps you could have them in some accelerated program, but i think it makes a lot of sense to require doctors to train or prove themselves in the specific country/region using the standard practices, tools, etc customary there. I wouldn't want a US doctor operating on me in India since they're likely to make assumptions and recommendations for treatment that overlook local practices, resources, etc.
The surgeon from Mumbai can come in and prove their worth through a surgical residency. That’s completely fair.
But there is no point in pretending doctors are going to surge, the current administration is trying to make being a doctor harder, not easier. Doctors also avoid certain fields because it doesn't pay enough. The supply is also artificially restricted. It's a system so fucked that it's better to ignore it and pump out PRNs
Heaven help us.
I feel like that's a relatively novel insight. These days I hear about endometriosis once a month or so, mostly because of outspoken women advocates. I could swear I've never heard of endo before 2020.
As an example, the Australian National Action Plan for endometriosis is from 2018. Perhaps the currently practising generation of doctors did not have this kind of awareness during their training, and the next generation will fix it?
We need more doctors. The nation has grown, our medical professionals and courts must scale up. Automation isn't going to solve everything.