When a Degree Allows You to Do Anything in the Medical Field
This was shared recently on FB. A board-certified family doctor needs 4 years of medical school and 3 years of residency to do primary care. They cannot claim to “specialize” in dermatology. In the Wild West of unsupervised nurse practitioners, however, they can be whatever they want. One week they are doing primary care and dermatology. The next week they are gastroenterologists or cardiologists. Training and education be damned. And the physician assistants are trying to follow this same path.
Standing by saying NOTHING is akin to supporting this travesty. Patients are being put at risk every day due to this.
Note he has to only work 28 hours a week. Probably by doing unnecessary biopsies he generates a lot of income. Since he doesn’t know what they are, he just biopsies them all and knows it pays a lot.
Now we are seeing ordinary nurses go straight from nursing school to online nurse practitioners. They have absolutely no clinical experience, and frankly are rarely the top nurses. There will be a nursing shortage and an oversupply of incompetent wasteful advanced practice nurses. They are also extremely expensive as they order multiple tests and act as a triage nurse. For a specialist they are a nightmare as they just triage everything and we are supposed to bail them out for free. The only reason it works is the hospital gets to pay them less, bills for more and on top of it profits on all the tests they order unnecessarily. If the hospitals were put on a budget rather than getting to bill fee for service they would go broke.