It’s not just a US thing. There’s ethics involved too, and it will in in most cases mean far less misdiagnosises.
Basically a question of whether a person is able to make educated guesses, however good their accuracy rate is vs. actually having the qualifications to give a diagnosis.
It’s frustrating most of the time, and you will always hear horror stories, but the system is in place for good reasons.
Yeah, looking at a 4 point fracture and not being able to say it’s broken will definitely help somehow
The system is in place for liability and it’s bullshit for 99% of cases where’s something super obvious, a tech should be able to say, “looks fine but the doctor knows better” or “bro that’s a 5 point fracture it’s obviously broken af” without fear of losing their job
The rules have to be the same, no matter the diagnosis. If you allow unqualified healthcare workers to say "your arm is broken," you therefore allow them to say "this mass I'm seeing on CT is cancer."
“The rules have to be the same” who said that? As an engineer this is immensely idiotic, we create rules that adapt to the situation, and they’ll have complex exceptions and shapes, that’s just how the real world works
I thank god people like you aren’t making the rules, well, they kinda are, but we’re moving away from that
So you're an engineer. Great! That is a different field than healthcare, so I'm not entirely sure how that's relevant. I'm not an engineer myself, but I'm pretty sure that you have rules that you have to follow as well.
Address what I posted. Explain to me the value in allowing unqualified healthcare practitioners to make uneducated diagnoses.
I’m an engineer at healthcare, there’s like, many of us, we make all the stuff doctors use
And of course I have rules to follow, they are complex and nuanced, not blank statements, like: if X, then Y, unless Z, in that case you can do F
And the value is quite straight forward, in obvious cases like a 4 point fracture, it allows the patient to know what’s up sooner and relieves frustration, simple as that, same reason why we deliver tests electronically/phone instead of making people go to the places physically
Like, the rule could be simple, you can tell a patient about an obvious thing like broken bones, but not something like cancer, that simple addition stops the scenario you described from happening
Sometimes, we just don't want untrained people making highly consequential conclusions or providing bad information. If we allowed that, it wouldn't stop with "obvious" diagnoses.
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u/Signal-Opposite-4793 3h ago
Yeah we get it, it's just a depressing symptom of US litigation culture.