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The medical system in the UK is unusually bad. I found the medical system in Germany, Austria and Italy each far superior to it (and at least the last one of the three has no case for better socioeconomics). The US one was also superior, but (at least in the incarnation that you get as a PhD student at a reasonably rich university) still inferior to the three continental European countries above. My one encounter with the Canadian medical system put it only slightly below the Europeans. It's not clear to me if it's something cultural, or a consequence of the specific implementation and incentives it produces (I have low-confidence information that Sweden, which has the most similar medical system to the UK out of the ones I sampled so far, is similarly bad), but nowhere else have I encountered the combination of doctors who were this aggressively unwilling or unable to bring their brains to the job and just stubbornly prescribe heavy-duty medication which at best did nothing and at worst had nasty side effects based on an autocomplete-tier diagnosis (or actually googling the symptoms right in front of me) and complete lack of any equipment to even do something like basic blood tests (you get a referral to a lab and have to get another appointment once the results are in before they look at them, and the hope is clearly that in the >=7 days it takes the problem will resolve itself one way or another).
I hear this all of the time but I can't reconcile this with my experience.
I took my sister to the doctor in Italy once, in the countryside, and the doctor was an obese stupid looking guy in a big dimly lit room with no computer or desk. He looked at my sister's really strange bite on her leg and seemed oblivious to the possibility that this insect bite could cause Lyme disease. Even though she told him (in fluent Italian) that she was concerned this was a tick bite and that she could get Lyme disease. He just gave her some of of cortisone injection and sent her on her way.
She got Lyme disease.
On the plus side it was free.
I dunno I'm sure there are some doctors like this everywhere but if there was a doctor in the US that was this incompetent and they charged $200 I feel like the community would deal with them.
It's so unbelievable I'm doubting whether this actually happened even though I was definitely there and sober.
(Your UK assessment seems very familiar)
On the plus side, we're probably less than 5 years away from really good multimodal medical diagnosis AI. Hopefully these tools will start being used more, checklist manifesto style, as a sanity check for any diagnosis.
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I don't know if this is accurate for Italy or not but this is something I've noticed in Sweden.
Primary care is becoming a low status speciality due to a combination of increased workload and an influx of poorly educated and wetted non-eu doctors working in that sector (non-eu doctors that are not in primary care seem decent enough). This means that going to the doctor has become a complete gamble and unless you know that your gp is competent you can expect to have to do their job for them.
However, If you for some reason end up in a hospital you'll receive excellent care by competent doctors.
The end result is that if you unwittingly go for a one-off primary care visit in Sweden and you uncritically accept what the doctor says then you're more likely than not to receive very poor care for non-emergency issues (where they can refer you to a hospital).
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