What if.. you lost your medical?

what_next wrote:

A class one flying medical including all paperwork (most of which is done online!) takes about an hour here. So a drivers medical will maybe take 15 minutes. One single child per year not killed by a half-blind octogenerian is worth that effort.

I’m not a big fan of the ‘one child saved is enough’ mindset or costly feel good politics in general. That said, in my area, drivers over 70 renew their driver’s licenses every five years, in person, and are retested at that time including basic automated vision tests. At least that cuts ineffectual medical exams out of the picture and bases licensing on perfomance.

I get real medical exams with good lab work done every 12-24 months and dental checks every 6 months (the latter mainly because I go with my wife and she makes the appointment, I’ve never had a cavity).

Silvaire wrote:

The paperwork burden would be substantial, even in Germany where endless checks of everything and everybody in sight are done fairly efficiently. In comparison to the cost, I think the societal benefit would (again) be negligible.

It really wouldn’t if this were efficently integrated into the GP’s software. Average Germans go see a doctor 16 times a year, the elderly MUCH more often than that. Most of them would not even have to be specifically examined for such an evaluation, as their GPs already have all their personal health records.

quatrelle wrote:

You should come and see what its like in the UK, here you cant get past the receptionist let alone get an appointment to see a doctor.

I know, but your NHS has become a disgrace unfortunately. And you poor guys will not even get 350m Pound a week for it in exchange for wrecking your economy and alienating your neighbours, as was promised by some political charlatans in the UK… :( Many German doctors, myself included, once thought about working in the UK at some point in their career. No longer. Too bad, as the NHS as a concept is really great compared to most of the world’s systems, bringing great benefits for the population at relatively low cost (around 9% of GDP vs 11% in the German system and >16% in the US)

Silvaire wrote:

That said, in my area, drivers over 70 renew their driver’s licenses every five years, in person, and are retested at that time including basic automated vision tests.

That is at least something. In Germany driving licenses are issued for life. That life is often terminated by driving. Sometimes the life of other people as well.

Silvaire wrote:

That said, in my area, drivers over 70 renew their driver’s licenses every five years, in person, and are retested at that time including basic automated vision tests. At least that cuts ineffectual medical exams out of the picture and bases licensing on perfomance.

Seems like a sensible policy, which we don’t have unfortunately. Germans are as obsessed about the freedom to drive their cars, especially at high speeds on the Autobahn, as Americans are about gun ownership…

I knew about the German lifetime driver’s license when making that comment It becomes the subject of PhD-level analysis to determine whether a new license is, or is not, required after marriage, name change and permanent emigration

I know, but your NHS has become a disgrace unfortunately

As always, the real picture is more complicated. The NHS is overloaded by demand. One could argue that because the NHS is “free”, most Brits don’t attach much value to their health, eat crap, etc, and get ill. (Poor education is involved, too). The other aspect of this is that many GPs treat patients in a patronising manner – because most patients don’t want to know anything anyway. Then you get a lot of PC so if a 150kg chap sees a GP with a bunch of problems, the GP is not likely to say that he needs to lose weight (that aspect is changing, finally, but still diet is off the menu, so to speak). So… if you want to get looked at fast, you may have to pay £200 for a private consultant appointment (1 week instead of 12 weeks). The patient probably spends £200 a month on booze and fags anyway… Most people with a job can “go private” and a big chunk of NHS facilities caters for them. Nothing is ultimately free; you pay in your taxes. And most people in higher paid jobs have insurance so they go private anyway.

here you cant get past the receptionist let alone get an appointment to see a doctor

How long you wait for a GP appointment varies according to the local demand where you live. I can get one within a few days, or less. We have online booking, too.

Then you get a lot of PC so if a 150kg chap sees a GP with a bunch of problems, the GP is not likely to say that he needs to lose weight (that aspect is changing, finally, but still diet is off the menu, so to speak).

If the gp gets a complaint for insensitivity it could lead to hours of misery. Also, to lower patient satisfaction scores – not such a big thing in the UK yet, but in the USA patient satisfaction is thought to be correlated with increased mortality. Perhaps GPs need a license to be less rather than more deferential to patients.

A bigger question is whether GPs can encourage patients to lose weight anyway. If not, why waste breath and time? I’m being slightly tongue in cheek here as the GP clearly should discuss weight and diet, but it’s important not to overestimate what this is likely to achieve.

In the uk smoking is very much on the decline but losing weight is much harder than giving up smoking, it would seem. When it comes to smoking I would argue that most of the change has come from raising duty on cigarettes, changes to packaging, constant negative publicity, pub bans etc… Likewise I would expect similar measures (e.g. banning 2 for one junk food deals) to have more effect on healthy eating than a biennial nag by a GP.

Medewok: all my local German doctors bar one gp and one anaesthetist have recently left the UK.

Alcohol consumption has been falling slightly recently, though there are still a lot of people drinking too much. The other interesting change is that teenagers/twenty-somethings are drinking less than they did a decade or two ago. There are a surprising number of 50-90-something year olds getting drunk and falling down flights of stairs but they tend to be much quieter about it than younger generations.

Burt Rutan’s answer to losing his medical.

He first thought about building something that he could fly under LSA rules, but decided he didn’t like some of the restrictions. If I remember the talk he gave on it he mentioned a 10000ft limit which he said wouldn’t work because he couldn’t fly it over the rockies to Oshkosh. So instead he built an amphibious hydroplaning “motor-glider”. Apparently the American definition of motorglider is mostly to do with length of wing and / or the ratio of it to weight.

I wonder what kind of world we’d be living in if the average person had half the imagination that he does!