A number of years ago, a patient who came to our clinic reported progressive difficulty walking. She was already scheduled to see a neurologist, but the appointment was still months away. It was a grim irony that the patient might literally be unable to walk into the doctor’s office by the time of her scheduled appointment, leaving her both angry and frightened. Unfortunately, the problem of not being able to receive timely healthcare is only getting worse—causing frustration, discouraging patients from seeking medical treatment, and, in worst-case scenarios, resulting in more severe disease, complications, and even death.
Surveys show patients in the U.S. are now waiting a month or more on average for new-patient, non-emergent appointments. Some specialists are booking even further out. According to one source, patients currently wait an average of 42 days to see an OB/GYN provider and 36.5 days for a dermatologist. In busy metropolitan areas, the delays in receiving healthcare can be much, much longer: some patients wait up to 208 days to see a gastroenterologist in Detroit and as many as 175 days for a potentially life-saving visit with a cardiologist in Washington, DC.
Is Lower Quality Care the Solution?
In family medicine, the wait times have actually dropped 30%. This improvement is not due to an increase in the number of physicians* who are practicing family medicine, but is, instead, the result of shift in family medicine practice away from traditional clinical settings to retail clinics, urgent care centers, and telemedicine appointments—with much of this care provided by nurse practitioners or physician assistants. Unfortunately, these novel healthcare settings can lead to more misdiagnoses and lower quality care due to inconsistent providers and abbreviated staff, equipment, and facilities. Remote care, where the main diagnostic tool is interview, has its own innate limitations.
Regarding the massive trend towards replacing physicians with other providers with less training, a high-quality causal analysis published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that hospital stays in the Veterans Health Administration system rose 11% and 30-day preventable hospitalizations increased by 20% when NPs without doctor supervision provided the care rather than emergency physicians. In the same study, the cost of care also climbed when nurse practitioners oversaw care. Considering the fact that nurse practitioners complete 500-720 hours of clinical training compared to the staggering 10,000 to 16,000 hours physicians accrue by the end of their residencies, these disparities are not surprising and warrant further investigation to ensure that the quality of American primary healthcare is not declining as precipitously as the number of physicians.
The Hope for Timely CAM Healthcare
We have speculated in our previous blogs that your next option for primary care might be a Licensed Acupuncturist. Of course, only a few states—i.e., California, Oregon, Washington, and Oregon—legally allow L. Ac.s to be primary care providers. Nevertheless, faced with long wait times and persistent, sometimes debilitating symptoms, patients who are unwilling or unable to use the services of retail clinics and urgent care providers, but who want in-person healthcare, are naturally turning to acupuncturists and other CAM providers for practical solutions to their healthcare challenges.
In the U.S. today, there is only one acupuncturist for every 52 MDs, so there is considerable room for growth in the traditional Asian medicine industry. Not only does a significant percentage of the U.S. population lack ready access to Licensed Acupuncturists, many acupuncturists only maintain a part-time clinical schedule. In fact, a survey performed a number of years ago found that the average acupuncturist working in Tucson only performs 17 total treatments per week—a patient load unlikely to generate a living wage. From our personal experience, we have observed that many acupuncturists actually work a second job or rely on the income from a spouse or partner; regardless of the reason, the bottom line for patients is that part-time acupuncture clinics, like mainstream doctor’s offices, may not be able to accept new patients or offer convenient appointment times.
Here at White Pine Clinic, we support your right to timely care and offer a full-time schedule with Saturday appointments. If you are seeking relief but overbooked mainstream medical offices and part-time CAM providers just cannot accommodate you, we are eager to schedule you for timely, excellent, and affordable Chinese medical care—that fits with YOUR schedule. We look forward to seeing you soon.
*It is projected that by 2038 the United States will have 140,000 fewer doctors than we need to provide Americans with healthcare.