|
Additionally, watching House and other Western medical dramas tend to highlight the fact that in many Western medical practices, more attention is given to the battery of tests you can subject to before you do a proper medical history, which is a gigantic problem for even the simplest of cases because glossing over a proper patient interview can easily allow you to overlook facts and information about the patient that could have allowed you to make an accurate diagnosis before you even send the patient to a machine.
The suicidal patient you mentioned first is a case in point. If the doctors properly interviewed the patient and her family even while she was run on all the scans, you would have figured out that the patient suffers from depression. You would then follow up with questions about depression such as Anhedonia, depressed mood, sleep changes and most important of all suicidal tendencies. After that if you listened in class you'd remember that for female suicidal patients the most common method of suicide is overdose ingestion of chemicals and drugs, so your next question is to address the method of the suicide attempt. From there if you manage to confirm toxin ingestion you'd have her go an endoscopy/colonoscopy/abdominal CT, would have seen the bleeding ulceration wherever it is and did something about it.
Makes me glad I study in a third world nation where laboratory and machine tests are practically a last resort because few can afford them, if at all.
I should also mention that you could EASILY drive down medical care costs if doctors did their thinking jobs and interviews first rather than having expensive machines do all the heavy lifting. I certainly didn't enter and suffer through medical school to have a machine do my work.
Translation: If you go see a doctor and upon stating your problem his first reaction is to drop you in the MRI, go find a different hospital and a different doctor. Expect to pay out of your ass in medical fees.
|