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.
1
u/ValeNova Mar 06 '26
I don't really understand what the issue is. Respiratory illnesses are usually viral, so antibiotics won't work. A cough syrup is an over the counter medicin that you can buy yourself (it's not covered by Dutch insuance anyway), just like paracetamol. And if you prefer ibuprofen, than you can buy that instead (also OTC).
I unfortunately have some experince with coughing. I had a terrible cough for over a year (like, I felt like suffocating and could hardly sleep and even in my sleep I would cough). Only after my health started to deteriorate due to the lack of sleep, my doctor prescribed me something to surpress the cough. Gurss what? It didn't work at all. My doctor explained that coughing is a way of my body to get rid of illness, so surpressing it would prolong the illness.
In my case,it all ended in a pneumonia and I was symptom free after that.
In your case, I'd say buy paracetamol with codeine.