Thread by @Chronotope

Capitalism-based health care is the worst. I hate that it's only gotten worse and worse as time goes on, with more and more of the work of health care being put on to the individual and systems that you literally pay for becoming less and less helpful or useful.

For a lot of reasons I hate all ways to find doctors are gradually devolving to Yelp, which not only puts the work on you to find a good doctor but also inevitably undercuts your confidence in any doc you find b/c the wisdom of the crowds is a terrible gateway into medical care.

I do not blame ProPublica for this and am glad for this reporting, but everything has been magnified since I read this - propublica.org/article/top-do… & now search certifications I see in doc offices and the minute I see a bullshit "top doc" plaque I seriously doubt my provider choice

I never really paid attention to them before, but now they have the inverse of the intended effect, the more of these "top doctor" framed certificates I see in an office, the more I doubt my own choice of doctor.

I try to temper that thinking to some degree, b/c I also have an ego and if someone was like 'here's a plaque and a press release you can buy about how great you are and also free marketing as a result' I might also be inclined to do it, especially now w/docs worried about SEO...

But yeah, not great.

It really sucks b/c as the process of *finding* medical care is increasingly commercialized w/Urgent Care, ZocDoc and apps it means the market incentivizes services to find more arbitrary ways to shake down doctors & differentiate ratings that have nothing to do w/quality of care

Having a "marketplace" for doctors that runs on Yelp-like rules just further divorces quality of service from a system for finding a provider. And I know it sucks for doctors too, who now all poll me on "how did you find us" aggressively b/c they have to be marketers now too.

I'm sure I can't be the only person frustrated by the fact that all medical care now comes with brand recognition / lift measurement surveys.

I don't even know what to say about aggressively marketed medical services like Capsule or Forward, where they employ the shallow marketing tactics of growth hacking & I am aware enough of what's going on to see it as *instantly* discrediting. But also, what choice do they have?

Like the problem is that marketing does not sell me on medical care. Years of looking at sketchy doctor's ads on the subway have made me instantly distrust medical marketing... but then how do good doctors break through these terrible recommendation systems? I dunno.