Quote:
Originally Posted by Zephyrus
Is this true? I haven't read it anywhere, but I heard that in Russia, their medical doctors use the same needles over and over again. They just sterilize them. Is that true? And how do other countries medical standards compared to ours?
|
It's certainly possible. I won't take any sort of stance on the question one way or the other as it pertains to Russia specifically. There are certainly situations where I can believe that it happens.
I'm actually in Australia right now and hanging out with some British medical students so I can answer the question in regards to those countries.
From what I've seen/heard, overall medicine is medicine. The premium on data that has come about because of the movement toward evidence based medicine has made some treatments very standardized (which is actually really beneficial to me because it means that I know the answers to the questions when asked). So that means that in most first world countries things are going to be similar (though not the same). I'd even venture that in the affluent, developed portions of developing nations are going be close as well.
Where I notice the difference most, because it's what impacts me or sticks out the most to me, is the differences in the education and training setups that exist. In the rest of the world students enter medical school directly from HS, and it takes 6 years instead of the 4 years of college and the 4 years of medical school in the States. The post-graduate training systems are also different. Whereas in the states, recent grads go directly into their specialty of choice (or at a minimum a year of something similar to their ultimate goals), in these other countries, the recent grads spend two years in a general training program which will include patients of all ages and several different fields of medicine (including surgical specialties). So needless to say all the other students are very shocked when I (the future pediatrician) am able to say that I have less than 15 days of treating adult patients left in my career.
The other thing that's very noticeable is the working hours for those in training/residency programs. In the US, residents are capped at working 80 hours a week averaged over 4 weeks and get a set salary...in Australia, they're contracted to work 38 hours a week, and get overtime pay when they work more than that. In the UK it's 48 hours, salaried. Everyone thinks we work too hard. I just have to laugh at the concept of only working 38 hours a week since the typical call shift in most US residency programs is 30 consecutive hours. Much of the overseas concern for duty hours comes from studies showing increased errors by those burdened with fatigue, but one of the residents said he had seen the USMLE questions that make up our board certifying process and he thought they were incredibly difficult. I also think that in the US there tends to be more oversight of what inexperienced doctors do by the older residents and the attending physicians but at the same time the interns are given responsibility in patient care. In Australia, my intern is getting good at paperwork but not really making decisions on treatment.
In more general terms of health care quality, the US lags behind other systems, due in large part to the issue of the uninsured. At least in other countries patients don't use the ER as their primary source of care. It's an issue of access to care more than anything else. If you can pay for care in the US, you're golden, but obviously there are wide swaths of our population which don't fit that description.
Certainly, compared to developing countries, we have a lot more "stuff" in our arsenal of care. It's not really a fair comparison. But I think most people would be shocked about how well physicians in these countries care for their patients with the limited resources.
Hybrid Mode
