Wow LG thats three times the price of private fibroscan here! Heppers are really doing it hard over there these days.
We get a great deal here as far as blood tests go, with Medicare paying for most of them, though sadly that could well be about to change.
I would also be very interested to know if it was possible to bypass a doctor to get tests here in Australia (I don’t think it is and I guess partly thats due to having to monitor the subsidising of tests).
Also looking for a way to access my own records of past tests. I am continually frustrated by my GPs reluctance to give me copies of my own results. The medical fraternity are a bit like the mafia I sometimes think, always looking to protect their interests. Must be especially hard for them in the internet age when everyones a google expert. And lets face it, most people are not capable of managing their own health care.
Presumably Australians could use international online testing services but thats obviously going to be expensive.

That’s the thing I was wondering about – why are doctors necessary for asking for tests anywhere? Is it that they are worried about patients freaking out if they test themselves? I can’t think of any other reason.

I think that is a very good question BB and one that has always bugged the hell out of me.

The medical fraternity are a bit like the mafia I sometimes think, always looking to protect their interests.

I agree FF. The UK is littered with professional institutions all claiming that they must insert themselves between us and the information we want, all for our own good. Geez, haven’t we moved on from when catholic priests were required to translate the word of god from Latin into something the peasants could understand? That was nice little earner for them until the bible was translated into English.

Now, however, the internet has gone a long way to breaking this ‘jobs for the boys’ jolly. There are services which will do blood tests without a doctor in the middle if you can pay. Just to be clear, I am not for total DIY doctoring. I think that specialist medical services are essential in some cases. But it just gets my goat to pay a consultant just for signing off on some initial tests and then maybe sitting on the results for which I have the extra step of hounding him to get the results.

dt

Further to my last post, the blood services for which you don’t need to get a doctor tend to employ their own doctors. All the results are looked at by a doctor and an interpretation is included in the service. You are warned in advance that should anything abnormal show up in your tests then you may be strongly recommended to go to your own doctor and follow up on it. Some services include a free consultation with their doctor on your results if you request it.

So there is nothing irresponsible going on here. Except for the scaremongering put out by certain bodies with interests in keeping us dependent on them and in the dark. When the first English language bibles were produced, it became a crime in the UK to own one, punishable by burning at the stake as a heretic. So, people in high places were serious about protecting their interests. Now here we are 500 years later but human nature has not changed.

dt

Either way, he wasn’t available for whatever reason, for another 6/7 days of them being ready and available,

LG – I wouldn’t be happy with that – at all!
If there is a next time for you, maybe find another service. They usually state the turn-around time for each test so that you know what to expect. If they don’t deliver then complain and walk. Well, here’s me trying to tell my granny how to suck eggs . (Reference to your age not intended, only to your experience in such matters.)

dt

I’ve got more to say about medical results coming in late.

Back when I was doing interferon tx I asked the NHS for more frequent PCRs and was refused. Consequently I turned to the few private services there were at the time to get an additional PCR done. I waited …and waited … and waited. I enquired. I enquired all the way up to the CEO of the company. Eventually I got a refund on the test when they admitted that their turnaround was not acceptable. Their excuse – they had been batching the PCR tests and they hadn’t got enough for a test run to be profitable.

So 4 weeks after the original test I turned to another company and got my result, only to be horrified that I had had a viral breakthrough. So because of that the tx was stopped, but I had had to endure 4 weeks more of interferon than necessary because the original test was late. I can imagine other circumstances where a 4 week delay might be fatal. Plus, if the NHS had had their way with saving the money on the PCR I’d have had many more months of futile interferon tx, unaware of the breakthrough.

So it’s no joke when medical tests come in late, or are not done at all when you have good reason to believe that they are necessary. Decisions are made on the results of these tests which can profoundly affect the health of the patient. It’s not like your car has to stay another day in the garage because a spare part wasn’t delivered, or your order from Amazon didn’t make the estimated date on your order confirmation. It is not just an another administrative nuisance – but so often it is treated as no more serious than that.

Don’t stand for it!
dt

I do feel bad when I complain about the NHS, they have been good in other areas in the past, but as you say, when these errors and delays can affect the health of patients, (as it did you DT) it’s a serious matter. What if a typo reflected a fibroscan eg? My notes from 1st hospital haven’t arrived at 2nd one yet, surely they should be digitally accessible?

It IS a serious matter, EVERY TIME. Because you can’t tell which time will be the time that causes you to lose your life. I actually had 6 unnecessary weeks of interferon if I count in the 2 more weeks that the NHS took to belatedly confirm the PCR result that I had obtained for myself. I would have liked to have stuck all the miscreants in that scenario with 6 weeks of interferon to see how much more motivated they would have been to produce the required test results.

There is a certain collective loyalty to the NHS in the UK such that people do feel bad complaining about it. When the NHS came into being in 1948 it was truly a godsend to people who had hitherto had no medical services at all if they could not pay. Shades of that reverence still survive to the present day. Also, there are areas which really are excellent. But time has moved on. The UK is in the EU and should have standards which match the best of the EU. It has become like the family secret that nobody wants to say out loud – that some parts of the NHS look more like the services of a third world country than a modern EU country. Now that our junior doctors trained in the UK have been railroaded into a new contract that they don’t believe in, we shall probably have to go to one of those third world countries to get treatment from one of them. Meanwhile who is going to be treating us here?

Of course all the records should be digitally accessible! We should also have the option of getting all our records downloaded straight to our mobile device if we want, or to a medical card which we can hand to the doctor who needs it. This goes for our dental and optical records as well. And yet we still have to navigate these legacy systems, waiting for weeks for records to arrive where they are needed because somebody somewhere along the administrative chain went on holiday, or something.

dt