Trick or Treat - a survival guide to health care
5 The importance of family practice The Belly and the Members: Once the limbs felt that they did all the physical work
and earned a living to feed the belly. The belly did no work except receiving feeds at regular intervals and sort them out at leisure. The limbs told the belly to look for
food by itself. The belly had no option but to starve. The whole bodily system
weakened. The limbs realised that they needed the belly to sort out food and nourish them. They realised how foolish they had been.
As health care became more specialised, the importance of family practice and
primary health care diminished. People said "What is the use of consulting a family doctor? He only refers us to another doctor. Why should we go through this sorting
office? Why not bypass him?" They began directly consulting a specialist based on their own opinion on what was wrong with them.
The Specialists did not insist on cases coming to them through a referral system as
prior handling by "those GPs only complicated the 'scientific management' under the
specialists." The problem with self-referral was that many care seekers ended up consulting the 'wrong specialist' whose main job was to rule out any diseases concerned with his/her speciality. Soon, the society had a hi-tech, expensive and often wasteful health care system with little improvement in the outcome. People wondered what went
wrong.
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