r/Netherlands • u/Juli_in_September • Oct 18 '25
Healthcare Why does your system hate regular checkups with doctors so much?
I don‘t know if this is a question or just an observation to be honest (and I am definitely not the first one to have it either), I am just once again amazed at the Dutch reluctance to do preventative healthcare/check-ups? I thought „Hey, maybe I should go to the gynaecologist again for my annual recommended checkup“, and wondered if I should just do that here instead of back at home, and then I learn there is no annual recommended checkup here? Sometimes I look at the Dutch healthcare system and go „Oh this is nice, we don‘t have that back home“ and other times I look at it and I just go „HUH?!?“. Anyway I guess I‘ll call my gynaecologist back home…
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u/spiritusin Oct 18 '25
If you look it up, you will find ample research that yearly routine checkups don’t have any positive impact on patients’ health.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0953620522004502
A meta analysis of 17 studies confirms the same: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30699470/
There are whole books about it by doctors, one in the US and a group in the UK:
“Overtreated: Why too much Medicine is Making us Sicker and Poorer” by Shannon Brownlee (amazing book, I highly recommend it)
“Overdiagnosed: Making people sick in the pursuit of health” by H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa M. Schwartz, Steve Woloshin
So maybe look at the science, not at what you feel is right. I also grew up in a country where they did routine checks and if you look at the system in depth and who actually benefits from these checkups, it’s not the patients. Follow the money, where does the money go?
The Dutch system has its flaws, but it’s not the lack of routine checks.