Russian medicine and widespread distrust of it

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

According to the latest research by VTsIOM "Quality of medical services: a request for strict control", more than 40% of Russians do not trust doctors.

In cities with a population of one million, 48% of citizens rechecked the diagnosis or the medicines prescribed for them; in cities with a population of 500-950 thousand inhabitants, there are fewer such distrustful patients - only 39%. But this is just understandable, the possibility of choosing a doctor or clinic in Moscow or Krasnodar is incomparably higher than in Kostroma or Kirov.

It is the prudence of the Russians who, it seems, do not trust anyone at all, seems to be surprising. If the degree of their trust in doctors fluctuates around 50%, then one can only guess what trust politicians, courts and the media enjoy with them. The conviction that the Russian people are gullible and that literally any rogue can deceive them, often slipping through the statements of politicians and journalists, has absolutely no basis at all. Over the past 50 years, the vast majority of Russian people have acquired a strong immunity to promises, slogans and even social stereotypes, which, of course, include the high reputation of the profession of a doctor or teacher.

There is nothing shocking in the numbers of sociologists. Any adult who encounters domestic medicine more than twice knows for sure that the diagnoses made by different specialists can differ dramatically. One will say that you have kidney stones, and the other will find some kind of cyst. And go check …

This is not to mention the drug prescribing system.

Despite the fact that many medical experts have long and openly been talking about the catastrophic decline in the level of training of doctors in universities and in postgraduate education, I am sure that the pharmaceutical industry contributed to the destruction of the reputation of doctors in society in the first place.

Having put them on the needle back in the 90s of payments for prescribing "necessary" drugs, transnational pharmaceutical corporations, and after them domestic packers of all kinds of dietary supplements and miracle pills, corrupted thousands of doctors who were used to receiving an additional 2-3-10 their salaries from drug manufacturers. They went from treating doctors to pill sellers. The mechanism is simple. The more prescriptions you wrote, the more you earned.

And people are not fools. The first thing that patients double-check today is the list of drugs that the attending physician prescribes for them. And no ordinary explanations that cheap generics work much worse than the original drugs, no longer make any impression on people. Especially considering the average size of a pharmacy check, which can inflict a devastating blow on the pocket of not only a pensioner, but also a working person. And the health insurance system, which would regulate and cover the costs, including for medicines, has not worked in Russia.

Commercial clinics have not become a panacea for the corruption of public medicine either. Moreover, pharmaceutical companies work with doctors of private clinics in the same way, and the likelihood that you will be prescribed a medicine that you can easily do without is no less than in a district clinic.

Moreover, commercial doctors still have to fulfill the financial plans set by their employer. Hence - a huge number of completely unnecessary analyzes, repeated appointments, each of which is paid for according to the standard price list.

In fact, Russian doctors are beginning to work on the "better to cure than to cure" model, where the patient is viewed as a cash cow and a source of wealth.

The endless high-profile stories of terrible medical errors that have regularly surfaced in recent years are just a terrible reality that anyone can face. Healthy people don't even want to think about it. But, as soon as a person has a medical problem, he is faced with the realization of a wild fact: the choice of a doctor is a lottery, the stake in which is health, and often life.

Like 50, and probably 100 years ago, people include all their connections and acquaintances in order to find a doctor on the recommendation. The reputation of medical institutions has never developed in the country. Moreover, completely toxic reputations of large centers are abundant. As, for example, at the oncological center on Kashirskoe highway, which was recently shaken by scandals in connection with the dismissals of doctors by the new director, or the Bakulevsky cardiovascular center, the corruption of whose surgeons has been legendary for decades. But this does not surprise anyone. Since the heads of large medical centers are the same officials who are appointed by the bosses and they only need to report to the bosses, there is simply no long-term motivation to create a structure that people will trust and recommend to each other.

Actually, in order to understand how things are going in Russia with the level of trust in the domestic "standard" medicine, according to Minister Skvortsova, it is enough to look at where Russian VIPs are treated.

And here nothing has changed in thirty years. The list of their routes still includes Germany, Israel, Switzerland, USA …

Rich and influential people prefer to solve absolutely any problem abroad. Oncology and plastic surgery, joint diseases, neurology and cardiovascular diseases.

You don't have to ask ordinary citizens about trust in Russian medicine. It is enough to ask the family, for example, Luzhkov …