Military Medicine

[Dr Steve]

Why is military health so shabby. Most of us just prefer to self mediacte at the local wallgreens then go to medical on base and get the O so familiar 800mg IBUFEN or generic cough drops.

Its a complete shame that for what we do we never get any honest health diagnoses we get 10 min in a office and then all a sudden we have a prescription that in all reality we never use because we realize tat the person that gave it to us is just trying to see as many people as she can and didn't give a shit about us , but more appointments means better eval. Yet we leave with no answer to any sickness or decent explanation



Very respectfully,


<anonymous>




I have no idea, to be honest. I know a lot of the orthopedists and trauma surgeons who rotated through Iraq and Kosovo and places like that, and they are all excellent. As far as primary care on base, I don't know why it would be anything but excellent, but your experience sounds perfectly awful.

If an employer pays a doctor a salary with no incentive to do well, that doctor will eventually get bored and lazy. It may have something to do with how the military compensates its physicians.

Let's look into this together and maybe we can find some kind of answer. Is this true of people you know on other bases as well? If not, it may just be a local problem. If so, it may be a system problem and I can look into it; we could publicize it on the next weird medicine, which will be before the election. Our men and women in the armed services deserve the best medical care we can give them.


your friend,



steve


Anyone on RF.NET have any experiences with this? The research I've done shows mixed results. Some people have had experiences like this poster, and others state it's free and good. My experience is limited to the people I've known who have delivered military medicine, and all of them were conscientious, caring docs.

One of the incentives to deliver better care in the private sector has been to pin compensation to quality measures and patient satisfaction. Some insurance companies are starting to listen to patients who complain that their doctor is arrogant or the staff is not responsive. The better you rate, the more money you can make. Believe me, that's a heck of an incentive for doctors' offices to do a better job of customer service. It may be that the military medical service would benefit from some of these incentives.

I'll report back when I have more concrete information.

[Midkiff]

I do have experience here. A huge number of these military doctors and even more so their assistants/nurses assume people are coming in with BS complaints, because that's the only way to get legit time off of work. They laughed at me when I had the flu, they laughed at my sister when she complained of the ailment that eventually killed her.

They have no accountability, and too much of a shroud of protection.

[ravn816]

Not in the military, but have had a few friends that have been (now retired) and the medical care stories I hear are similar to the posts here.

[A.J.]

I work with military folks and from what I've heard, TRICARE sucks.

[Fezticle98]

I grew up in a military family and spent a good deal of time overseas where the base clinic was the only option for medical care.

A lot of the doctors were foreign-born and received their medical training in third world countries. It was interesting as a civilian having to receive medical care from military doctors.

[Dr Steve]

I do have experience here. A huge number of these military doctors and even more so their assistants/nurses assume people are coming in with BS complaints, because that's the only way to get legit time off of work. They laughed at me when I had the flu, they laughed at my sister when she complained of the ailment that eventually killed her.

They have no accountability, and too much of a shroud of protection.

arrrgh, I hate to hear this. Do some in the military abuse the system to get time off? One thing we're taught early on is that even goldbrickers get real diseases sometimes, so you have to take every complaint seriously. It's easy to get complacent when you have a long line of totally healthy young people parading through your office, though...heck, no one ever has anything, right? So you miss the one who's really sick; it is so hard to remain vigilant. I think I would stink at it...I'd get lulled into a sense of complacency too, I'm afraid, if that's indeed what's going on. I'm really sorry to hear about your sister, man. As I said before, our military brothers and sisters deserve excellent health care, just as everyone else does.

We need data; I'll see what I can come up with over the next few days and get back to you.