This is what you get when a bunch of presstitutes try and play doctor.
There’s so many amateurs playing doctor the profession has been set back decades. It may take another century to get back to where we were 40 years ago. Who knows? Maybe that’s a good thing.
People may get a chance to re-discover why certain things just aren’t done. We’ve already “accepted” several the detriment of which has yet to fully impact.
Just one little thing, trivial really: My Allergy/Immunologist is an old classmate. I never mind sitting for 30 minutes, i understand why, the risk is small but occasionally she will pop out and talk while I am waiting.
She can no longer ask people to wait in the waiting room for 30 minutes. Now she is “allowing” them to wait in their cars in the parking lot. She said, “I don’t know how we are ever going to get that genie back in the bottle.” Meaning people will be even less willing to wait 30 minutes. Iv’e seen a young woman almost die from not waiting thirty minutes after a PCN shot for Syphilis. Fortunately she hadn’t gotten behind the wheel and driven off yet.
So there are a million little things that took decades to get people to accept and now they feel they “Know more than the damn doctors.” Good for them. They may get to pay the consequences of such folly but the genie’s definitely out fo the bottle. It took a century to tame last time.
...and if you don’t believe me I can point you to some 20 screen names I can easily identify after a month. (Is yours one?). Yes it is. It’s Okay.
One of the things that gives me real pause is Neonatology. The Neonatal Nursery. What we have now is EXTREMELY sophisticated application fo VERY advanced technology to provide these 24 weekers nutrition, ventilators support, protection from infection, etc. and this field is so very different from routine ICU work and even very different from normal Pediatric ICU care. The guys that do this live in their own little world and rarely interact with outsiders. After all my experience and just ONE MONTH of “being there, in the NICU every day” ALMOST got me to where I felt I might be able to do it and not cause too much carnage trying to “pick up the ball”.
This kind of knowledge, that we take for granted is VERY perishable and would take decades to recreate. And there are maybe one or two at any given hospital. So one outcome of all this is going to be a predictable increase in Infant Mortality as the wreckage of our healthcare system has to be rebuilt. And all because ethical standards that have been recognized for decades are tossed into the fire. Because PPE is ESSENTIAL to the NICU.
Another thing that is going to suffer? Joint replacements. The reason we have joint replacement technology is 40 years ago they recognized that the infection rate made the procedure essentially “murder”. A bright Orthopod (it happens) realized there was “new technology” he could bring to the “table” and invented “The Laminar Flow Operating Room”. THIS is what made the entire industry possible. If we lose this capability there could be “no more joint replacements”.
Any service people are now accustomed to is at risk if we can no longer provide the infrastructure and professional staff to operate it. Which will survive and which won’t is still up in the air.