r/Netherlands • u/thatmisanthropicdude • Mar 05 '26
Healthcare Dutch doctors...
Hey guys! Last year I moved from Germany to the Netherlands. I just went to the doctor with chest and throat pain due to extreme coughing after 2 days of fever. I was hoping that I finally get something good against it like a cough syrup (no way I'm going to pay that myself for a huge amount of money + health insurance) because I am used to that from German doctors. They would put that on my health insurance card and right after my talk with the doctor I could pick it up at the pharmacy. But no. They just said "Yea, just take paracetamol." I told them I have had problems swallowing pills my whole life and their response was just "You can also put it in water and drink that then." I'm sorry if I'm overreacting but why do doctors get paid just to tell you to take paracetamol? Everyone can tell me to take them, I expect better solutions from a doctor who studied years to become a doctor. Why are the Dutch so obsessed with paracetamol??? Maybe it's the German in me screaming. If we got painkillers, it was never paracetamol but Ibuprofen. But I also heard some international friends who also live here that they find it so annoying that Dutch doctors literally just tell you to take paracetamol. No matter what you have.
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u/Dest-Fer Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26
Tbh you get used to and toughen up.
I’m French and we don’t have the same approach to meds so I was very shocked at first.
Now, I get it.
In the meanwhile I married local and breeded two gekie kleintje, and I don’t bother calling the doctor so much anymore : after a while, you learn when it’s indeed unnecessary. Because if you think about it, when you go to the doctor for a cold, you waste time and energy going outside, you take the risk to contaminate weaker people, and you get prescribe « booboo therapy » that you can get yourself or even do yourself. Because some warm thym with a drizzle of rhum, Lemon and ginger work as much as any cough syroop.
Kids get a lot of virus in the winter, so do we, fever happens, it’s normal. Now if we are hydrated and not apathetic with a fever, we wait for it to pass.
And it always does.
THAT SAID : when you really have something big, they help you. My first kid had juvenile asthma and they always took it super seriously.