Should of left him a stool sample

Simple you guys hate doctors so much just don’t go.  Saves the hassle of seeing shitty patients and you of seeing a shitty doc.  Sounds like simple plan.

Probably some asshole surgeon who had been up on his feet the past 40 hours straight doing emergency surgeries, lifesaving trauma procedures, etc. who had a whopping 20 minutes to try and sit down and grab something to eat before starting another case.

You showed that pompous nobody!

I call and ask if doc is running on time.  If so then I head out.  If doc is behind X minutes then I tell the receptionist I will be there X minutes later than my appt. time

One time I called and was told doc is on time.  When I arrived I was told doc is running behind so I said I'm leaving.  Receptionist said I would be charged for a missed appt.

I said nope, I'm here on time, doc is not.

Damn, I shouldn't complain so much about my PCP. But damn, he wants to see me every three months to refill my meds. Then he wants to examine me and talk, talk, talk. I just want to get in and leave. I tell him I'm fine, to refill, and lets go. He wants to chit chat like I'm his entertainment for the day or something. Shut the fuck up and let me out of the damn exam room. I don't have to wait long at all to be seen though, so I guess that's good.

Typical appointment:
I sign in, wait no more than 10 minutes, get my weight taken, get put in a room, his hot ass Nurse with a perfect body and huge engagement ring flirts with me (because she obviously wants me right?...right?), then the Dr. comes in, examines me (and always massages my shoulders a few times, don't know what he is checking for but its kinda gay), asks if meds are working (no dude, that's why I want them refilled so I can keep taking shit that doesn't work), and then asks me about what exciting shit I've done as a Cop since he last saw me (Paperwork Mother Fucker, I'm not getting in shoot outs with Scar-Face over here). He finally types up the prescriptions on his tablet, tells me what great shape I'm in and to keep doing what I'm doing, and lets me leave. Repeat in three short fucking months.

My family doctor is a raging liberal but she takes her time with patients and I never feel rushed. I have had to wait an hour in the examination room a couple of times but at least she takes the time to listen to her patients. At one time my wife was her nurse and she told me that the doctor is always behind because she's thorough. I can deal with it. She will refill most any of my scripts without an office visit. It also helps that my wife is friends with her too.

true

I’m a podiatrist and I frequently have to add an emergent case on before clinic starts or over lunch to open someone that has gas gangrene, necrotizing fasciitis, septic arthritis, etc.  oftentimes they go right from the ER to the OR if severe enough.

These issues are looked at -
And there are multiple issues

Almost nobody pays for their own care.
There are plenty of places you can book a $300 45 minute appointment and pay out of pocket and then get the 50 bucks or whatever cut rate the insurance wants to pay back yourself.

That cut rate reimbursement has them booking four appointments an hour to stay afloat. But patients with complicated stuff need more time.

People with an appointment for a kid show up and want the other two kids seen also.

People show up sick as hell.  Grandpa with chest pain, heart failure, and pneumonia gets dragged in by family with not enough sense to have taken him someplace for serious problems.

People call begging to get squeezed in and those get shoehorned.

Electronic medical records killed physicians efficiency.

Huge insurance, prescription, etc. Issues, documentation, requirements, etc. eat up and waste a ton of time.

Some specialists get called to the ED for a consult or have to go to the OR because even though they were scheduled for clinic, the other guy is already in an OR, hurt, or something that popped up.

One of the docs or PAs or nurses there unexpectedly went out with pregnancy problems or something.

Now, this is GD.
So everyone person here that has had an inconvenient wait has had that happen because either-
Their doc was out all night doing hookers and blow and showed up late
Their 150K Range Rover or G-wagon broke down on the way to work again
They were banging a hot nurse in the supply closet
They decided to play 18 instead of 9 holes of golf in the middle of the day.

It’s a pain in the ass and has happened to me, my wife, etc.

And I wish GD members whose work, businesses, etc, all run flawlessly without hiccups always ahead of schedule and perfectly were more common.

Because despite reservations I have had tables at restaurants run late with a wait, food take way longer than it should to arrive, builders and contractors fuck up and be late or no show, landscapers arrive hours late, deliveries late, orders messed up, forgotten to be shipped, lawyers, dentists, financial planners, accountants, HVAC, cable, service departments, etc.  be late, not ready.prepared, bring wrong stuff.
Not too long ago I bought a 15K zero turn once, delivery scheduled, and then when they didn’t come called and found out they sold it to someone else who left with it on their own trailer after I had bought it.  I had a high end custom builder mess up on a plan and there was not room for my stairs to an attic.  My pool installers shot my pool and completely forgot the retaining wall wings.  And put in 3 foot instead of 8 foot paver decks on each end.The guy at autozone the other day grabbed the wrong battery off the shelf I had just bought instead of the one a few inches taller.

My new metal roof got delayed in progress at my last house because the police showed up, served a warrant, and took the head guy off in cuffs.
When my new deck sat I worked on for a few days we looked into it and were ghosted and then found out a guy had jumped bail in the truck with all the work tools.
The worst was when we had the world’s most perfect yard guy about 15 years ago.  He was fantastic at the same price as anyone else.  We loved that guy.  He had been employed at a high end golf course forever.  He loved working outside and everything he did from basic yard work to landscaping was fantastic.  But…. He was a chain smoker.  And left the golf course when they made it no smoking anywhere.  He dropped dead of a huge blood clot in his lung he got from the lung cancer he didn’t know he had yet.  The nerve of that guy no showing us.

For the love of God someone of you need to take these places over.

Plus became primary care doctors so that always goes perfectly smooth for me also.  

Thank God my pcp office is ran like a well oiled machine. When I have a scheduled appointment, it's probably 15-20 minutes from check in to check out. That includes getting weight, blood pressure, medical history review with his nurse then seeing the doc. My pcp is so good that he came to see me in the early morning hours when I got admitted in the hospital with my gallbladder. He wanted to check in with me, see how I was doing. I thought that was excellent service. The dude cares about his patients.

Ill just say it.  The *vast* majority of you doctors are assholes.  Plain and simple.
Ok  you save lives but you still dont have to be assholes as part of the process

Just stop booking so many appointments per day you assholes.  And dont give me any of that you cant profit unless you book like you currently do either that is just a load of bullshit and just makes you that much more of an asshole for trying to feed it to us.

The truth hurts ZFG

Long answer: No, we won't stop booking more appointments per day. You're not the customer, you're the consumer. There's a difference. (Unless you're directly paying your doctor. And you're not). Read any of the responses we've written above. You're asking people to go directly against their own economic self-interest. No one does that. Patients, doctors, adminstrators, no one.

Short answer: No problem bro. You might be an asshole too. ZFG.

In March, my physical medicine doc got behind due to an emergency.

The nurse let me know after waiting 20 minutes it would be another 50-60 minute wait.
I said I'm outta here and they got me in the next day during his normal "lunch hour".

I felt special.

KISS THE RING OP!!!!!  Doctor is latin for god of gods!!!!!!  You show up two minutes late and you are a piece of shit.  But they can make you wait all day with no apology.  

They cant overbill if they don't overbook!!!!!!!  My wife shared a small office with a doctor of sorts.  She had to cover the front desk and billing, due to the normal lady being out for an extended period of time.  It didn't take her long to figure out he was billing for things he was not even doing.  But it's ok, because he is a Doctor!

@tsd1

As I stated already in my other post, doctors are NOT the core of the medical system.  It’s the staff that are doing hands-on care and keep the system running.

Our hospital system doesn’t bill canceled or no show patients.  In fact, administrators allow new patients to no-show 3 times before the practice manager calls the patient to find out why they are no-showing.  I shit you not.  And I am paid by services I give.  No-show = no money.

Attached File


I dream of doing this.

Without details, that post is meaningless.  “Doctor of sorts”?  What is that.  We have a busy-body in our community that is politically active who insists everyone call her doctor—she is a doctor of education.

As far as booking, each patient takes a different amount of time.  If we book, say, an hour per patient, then there would be a year backlog.  We probably do book a little on the heavy side, but I’ve had 4 new patients no-show in one day.  That’s a lot of time not seeing patients.  I’ve literally done the timer thing for patients and I can tell you that while they always complain of doctors not being in time, they complained even harder for being on a timer.  So there is no system to make everyone happy.

Yep

Sounds like the Elaine Benes "difficult patient" syndrome.

Sounds like every doctor's appointment I've ever been to. Their time is valuable, yours is not.

*shrug*  I guess they weren't feeling as strong as you that day.

My family doctor I've been going to since I was like 12 he is always there and yeah I have a 15-20min wait usually but he is never that late.

An occasional outlier situation aside, tardiness is unprofessional.  If I knew I was going to be late, I'd get the word out as soon as I knew to give people the option to wait or reschedule.

I'm like the OP.  It's not a matter of teaching him a lesson or not.  I would have walked and not cared about his reaction.

But I would have told all my friends.  

I don’t hate doctors at all. But the quality of care has declined over the past 30 years.  I blame substandard care for the docs not finding the cancer in my mom for six months after she first went to them and told them she thought it was back.  She died at the age of 64.  Dad didn’t fare much better. Congestive heart failure around the same time Bill Clinton also had same condition.  Bill’s still here and my dad is dead.  

The industry has changed.  It’s no longer about healing people. It’s about billable procedures.

I’m 53 and haven’t seen a doc in over a decade.  I should, things can change over 50. I just don’t want to deal with the medical industry though.

I had an appointment with a neurosurgeon that did my back surgery. I am waiting in the exam room and a nurse came in and said that he probably was going to have to reschedule, he just had an emergency. He came in about 10 minutes later and said "let's make this quick, I have a patient that just had a brain anurism (sp) on the table and I am heading in to assist". We had about a 45 second convo, he bounced and his nurse followed up with the details.

I have much respect for him after that.

Minor kudos to him, but tell us how much the bill is for 45 seconds when you get it......

I did this with my former doctor.

The last three times I used him I had appointments at 8, 8:30 and 8:15.

The first time he arrived at the office at 10 and apologized, said there was traffic.

Second time he showed up around 10 and acted like it was normal and didn't understand why I was upset.

Third time I was still recovering from cancer surgery (two weeks out and was having problems) At 9 I asked the nurse when he was seeing me as the pain was worsening and I was getting light headed. She gave a vague answer and I knew the fucker wasn't in the office. I asked her if he had arrived at the office and she stammered a bit and then repeated her vague answer.

I said fuck it and left. Found another doctor.

Respect goes both ways.

How very Stasi of you

So you let people take your property and ignore this?

How very socialist of you.

Yep. After my cancer surgery I had to see a kidney specialist because I now have CKD.

He seemed knowledgeable so I stuck with him for about a year. That's four appointments.

The receptionist called me and I quote "Mr. BGB, dee-id you get yo blud wurk dee-id? That's not an exaggeration. Bitch was dumber than a box of rocks and spoke just like that.

The tech girl never missed my vein though, but she hated everyone at the office and was vocal about it. And from what the other staff member said, the feelings were mutual.

When I ran out of meds between appointments 2 and 3, the nurse refused to speak to the doctor to get permission to call in refills.

When he asked me why I didn't call him to get them refilled we had a discussion about his staff. He said he would talk to them about it but apparently it didn't help because they did it again between 3 and 4.

I now have a better doctor with a professional staff that knows me on site and are always polite and perform their jobs.

The only down side is their tech can never find my veins on the first or even the fifth try. I leave their office looking like a heroin addict I'm stabbed so many times. Eventually she gives up and gets it out of the back of my hand.

But I don't care, the office environment so much better and this doctor is so much better.

Yes, patients who want to treat an appointment as social hour are timesucks.  I had to learn to remember which patients to not engage beyond simple pleasantries, because otherwise it would take an hour.

As a patient, I have never no showed for a visit.  Not to a doctor, to a dentist, not to anything healthcare-related.  Who does this?  I'll answer for you: TONS OF FUCKING PATIENTS.  People no show constantly, so if I schedule without overlap then I'm sitting around with my thumb up my butt.  If I could even charge $25 for a no show appointment, I'd still lose money due to sitting around but at least it would discourage the behaviour.

Another timesuck is patients who do the "oh and by the way" as I';m walking out the door.  There is a thing called chief complaint.  State what you want addressed at the beginning of the visit.  We can address 2, maybe 3 issues, in a visit, depending on what they are.  More than that, you need to make a follow up appointment.

Patients come to me demanding I fix XYZ, but then they have no idea what medicines they are on, and are shocked someone would want to know that.  Then patients want me to sit there while they try to call their wife or call a pharmacy.  

I spend a lot of time explaining to patients that the reason they are worse is because they aren't taking the medicine I prescribed.

Also, patients lie constantly.  When I point it out because it's material, I sometimes hear "I didn't think you needed to know about that."

Healthcare is messed up.  I will say that I'll echo what others have said in this thread, which is that the office staff make or break the clinic.  

My doctor is mostly on time + - 5/10 minutes.
You get 20 minutes...then he gets up and motions you towards the door.
If he knows it's going to take a while, he books a double appointment.
He knows his shit and respects his patient's time.

Last 2 visits to my urologist he's been a minimum of 1 hour late. If you're running that late call me so I can stay at work instead of using vaccation time waiting in a Dr's office

I am sure I could have rescheduled. You know, if I was a foot stomping internet GD type, but I really think the Guy with the aneurysm needed a minute.

I'm a Podiatrist.

We try to get our patients in the room before their appointment time and see them immediately.

Very rarely will we run behind, and it's normally less than 15 minutes.

Extremely rarely will I be stuck in surgery (that's usually a day that's blocked off for surgery only for our elective surgeries, but some emergency stuff has to go when it can get into the OR) and even then, the office staff is telling the patients of the possible delay, offering to reschedule or I'll stay late that day or another to get them back in.

I hate waiting.   I do understand that in some cases it's going to happen.   We get enough 'Oh, can you look at this big sore on my leg I forgot to mention when I got my appointment for my ingrown nail' patients to understand why it happens.   But that should be fairly rare.

One patient came 30 minutes late to his appointment and was nasty to the staff when they told him he'd have to reschedule...his excuse was 'all the other doctors make me wait longer than that'.

@ramairthree

Would you know if they are currently hiring Podiatrists now?
You wouldn't have any pics of the nurses there, would you?

No, but maybe the thread would be cooler if people turned it into a pictures of hot nurses thread

My doctors office has a VAP board with the names of the docs and the current wait time.
Most of the time the docs are running late because people can't communicate with them.