DO YOU HAVE A GOOD FAMILY DOCTOR ?

[newstart2380]

Recently I was very sick and had been seeing a doctor who is a nice person but misdiagnosed my illness after seeing that doctor for 3 months. I ended up in the emergency room at the hospital and then was admitted for a time.

I was lucky enough to see a doctor on duty in the ER and he shook his head and could not believe i was still walking around at all.

The doctor I had been seeing had no idea and in my opinion should not be practising at all until better qualified, scary to think we are allowing doctors into this country that are not qualified enough because of the so called shortage.

[goo**spew]

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@mugssy65 wrote:
Yep same Dr for 32 years! Dr L delivered all 4 of my children and still sees them all, funnily enough he is Australian and from what was once a small country town! I have no idea what I will do when he retires, it doesn't bare thinking about!

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Well, since he is not a tradesman or a removalist I don't think that's an issue 😉

[goo**spew]

And you never mentioned a broad, Australian accent 😉

[***super_nova***]

I do have a great doctor who I have been seeing for the past 20+years, unfortunately now that we moved some 40km away, it is bit too far if I am really sick.  In here most of the doctors are in those clinics where you never get to see the same doctor twice, and many are foreign. The couple of family doctors in this area do not accept new patients.  I do not believe that the o/s doctors are not qualified, they have to pass rather stringent exams before they are allowed to practice.  But i have had a problem trying to understand doctor with very heavy accent when I was so sick I could hardly stand up, which was a problem because he was trying to explain dosage for the medications he was subscribing etc.. 

I have seen very lovely Iraqi old doctor couple of times, for instance when I broke my arm, and he was very kind and gentle and did great job, but I could not understand a word he said 🙂

[kennedia_nigricans]

I don't know if my family doctor is good or not but i can give you the name of a bad dentist.

[twinkles**stars]

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@***super_nova*** wrote:

I do have a great doctor who I have been seeing for the past 20+years, unfortunately now that we moved some 40km away, it is bit too far if I am really sick.  In here most of the doctors are in those clinics where you never get to see the same doctor twice, and many are foreign. The couple of family doctors in this area do not accept new patients.  I do not believe that the o/s doctors are not qualified, they have to pass rather stringent exams before they are allowed to practice.  But i have had a problem trying to understand doctor with very heavy accent when I was so sick I could hardly stand up, which was a problem because he was trying to explain dosage for the medications he was subscribing etc.. 

I have seen very lovely Iraqi old doctor couple of times, for instance when I broke my arm, and he was very kind and gentle and did great job, but I could not understand a word he said :

medication comes with written dosage and instructions and I have always found the chemist makes sure I am aware of all dosagerequirements

[azureline**]

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@azureline** wrote:

I suppose we can only expect them to do their best?

Yes, we do and he is excellent! but if he made a mistake, I would probably not be so pleased.

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I didn't mention.... because it never occurred to me, my doctor is of Asian heritage............. no idea if he was born here or not.

[punch*drunk]

I have a lovely and very thorough family doctor who is Asian.

I can see where the OP is coming fom with the comment about overseas doctors coming here who are not sufficiently trained. It does happen and they do make mistakes. My dad has a very mangled finger to prove it. The doctor who treated him (badly) was from India and was supposed to be working under supervision, but he wasnt. My dads finger ended up so badly infected that it nearly had to be removed, in fact it probably should have been. For nearly a week all the doctor did was squeeze out the pus (sorry for the visual) wash it in saline and then wrap it up again. We ended up flying him back to Melbourne where he was admitted to hospital straight away, his blood sugar was through the roof, his heart rate was erratic and he was kind of delerious. His hand was in such a poor state that the nurse thought he'd put some kind of cream on it, but that was his skin 😞 He'd seen the other doctor only about 5 hours earlier and he'd failed to notice how sick dad was, just more squeezing and more washing 😞

Took them 3 operations and nearly 12 months of therapy and they still couldnt fix it properly.

This might sound crazy but I really think this incident, the serious infection and the anasthetics, brought on my dads dementia. not saying it wouldnt have happened anyway, but I think it was a catalyst.

[para-sights]

My current doctor is Asian and possibly the best doctor I've had. He has an accent but is easy to understand. My dentist is great too but he is a young Scotsman with a very thick accent and a little harder to understand. At the same clinic as my asian doctor I've had useless australian doctors and one very useless Indian doctor (who I liked but wasn't very good). It is like any profession - no matter where they come from it's the personal ability/attitude that sets them apart from the others.

[***super_nova***]

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@twinkles**stars wrote:

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medication comes with written dosage and instructions and I have always found the chemist makes sure I am aware of all dosagerequirements

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That is true, but some medication (antibiotics) has to be taken until finished, others are taken only if needed, and while needed, and some might need special instructions because of the patient's particular circumstances.  The chemist does not know all that.  And while I have on my shelf somewhere copy of MIMS and look up everything I am taking, most people do not have such reliable source of info.  Of-course, they can always google it.  But I think that actually understanding what is your doctor asking and what is he saying is absolutely imperative.

[lyndal1838]

My mother worked for nearly 40 years in a large, very busy medical clinic and it was a well known and discussed fact that Indian doctors who had trained in India were rather "hard" on patients...they had very little sympathy or empathy and treated patients like a production line...in and out as quickly as possible and no explanation of their condition.

There was a theory that life was not valued in India and doctors just had to treat as many as possible in the shortest possible time.  That is certainly how it appeared when the doctors came to Australia....they just were not as thorough as Australian trained doctors.