Hello everyone, I’ll be hosting the megathread while un_mask_me is out.
I completely forgot I had to post it until just now.
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Ass covering. I remember once I was at the department that does NCS and as the patient left the doctor told them they’d have to wait a couple of weeks for answers, then once the patient left she turned to the med students and said “So you wanna hear what he’s got”. In most cases where they do tests like that the doctor (And often the nurse or whomever) performing the tests can interpret the results pretty well, but for a lot of good reasons these test results have to be run by someone (Depending on who you are and where you practise it’s different, often it’s your attending, here you need to bring it up in the plenum meetings that happen at the end and start of every shift and confer with a specialist). So even if you do know, you can’t tell because if you say the wrong thing and you didn’t check with the one who has to okay it, it’s your ass. And it’s your ass in a career ruining way. And in most cases it’s better for the patient too to wait that extra time to be more sure that they don’t have to be issued a correction per mail or something.
Makes sense, but it’s annoying. Why don’t they just train all their staff to interpret the results properly?
In one sense they do, in another sense it would be impractical.
It takes like 5 years to specialise as a doctor (Sort of averaging it out here, since it varies by specialty and country), and that’s after your original doctor training and working as a doctor full time for years, and whatever extracurriculars you had to also do (phd-mds are common, in part because some specialities are very competitive).
Expecting that kind of specialisation from everyone who simply operates the machine is not practical.
Plus even if they do have that level of specialty, they still have to bring it up to colleagues to double check, since everyone makes mistakes (They do here anyway).
In the other sense, everyone involved in using the machine received at least some training in how to interpret the results and may have years of experience doing so (There are techs who have logged more hours staring at test results than senior specialists). But they are still not specialists
I’m just frustrated by the entire medical profession. Everything takes ages to resolve, many things never get resolved. Meanwhile my life is down the drain.
Your frustration is both warranted and understandable. Especially because the entire healthcare sector is treating you like garbage. I’m just explaining the process.