Originally Posted by Stucky

Nay. My mom wasn't figuring cost into the equation at all (That's more of my area of concer..). One of the things she meant was how, for example, when shec got seriously sick in her teens, they called the family doctor in the middle of the night...and he came to the house. Today, by comparison, when my mother gets sick (which is starting to happen quite frequently now that she is in her 90's) it can take HOURS just to get a hold of her doctor in the middle of the day, via telephone- if the doctor is even in town on that day. In the evening or on a weekend, forget it. Basically, if she needs any care outside of scheduled appointments....she just has to go to the hospital.

And sure, there have been certain advances in technology- like, if you get a limb sawn off or something, they may well be able to sew it back on today and make it usable, whereas that wasn't happening in 1940- but on the other side of the coin (and leaving cost completely out of the equation) I think doctors have largely lost the benefit of the knowledge they used to gain through experience, as that knowledge has now been replaced with high-tech tests (Often mandated by the doctor's insurance, merely as a defense in case there is a misdiagnosis- they can say "Well, we ran all of the standard tests, and this is whast it pointed to"), and medical studies, which are often contradictory, statistically meaningless, turn out to be fraudulent, etc.

The doctors now rely upon such things more so than on their own observations, and in many [most] cases have just become practitioners by rote of a complex system involving government, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, LLC's, etc. -with the patient being just a "client" who "receives services"- and the protocol which is followed is now administered by a doctor...but not really designed by him, so therefore is not necessarily specific to his patient, or what the doctor's experience would have him do...but is just what the doctor has been trained to do as being "proper protocol", based more upon the decisions and dictates of the aforementioned institutions, than on personal interaction and experience.

I haven't been to a doctor since 1978- and from what I've been seeing over the last few years now that my mother has been needing to deal with the healthcare system on more frequent basis, I can only say that I made a good decision way back when....