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This is what pissed me off the most, the red-flag, box ticking, exactly by the book diagnosing that GPs do.
I was getting this monthly, and telling the GP “I have this every month, I am here every month” but that didn’t fit the criteria for referral.
I had to say, to the letter, “I have had this 12 times this year”Every month ≠ 12 times a year.
TooTallTim-
having been dealing with ongoing Lyme infection for the last two years and forced to treat myself outside of the NHS, I have few good things to say about them and am surprised to hear from nurses and other staff I've routinely seen that they themselves have experienced the exact same indifference couched in kafkaesque rules and processes.
One phlebotomist had been told she was just stressed/depressed for two years in trying to get treatment for a digestive problem. Offered antidepressants and made to feel she was crazy. One endoscopy from a sympathetic locum nurse was all it took to diagnose quite an obvious stomach ulcer. Fancy a digestive problem coming from the digestive system! How outlandish. If the NHS's own staff can't get decent treatment what chance do the rest of us have?
GPs and Infectious diseases consultants are all smug, useless, indifferent pricks in my experience.
deleted
in Scotland so perhaps different, but I got told to get a tonsillectomy I had to have "chronic tonsillitis" which was defined as 7 times or more in a 12 month period. I'd get it about 6 times a year, so one month in two I'd have a week or two of fucking agony, and the scar tissue on my tonsils kept increasing so the bouts became more and more painful. There was never any of this "oh, you could self refer, didn't you know?" malark.
On the seventh time I fucking ran to the GP and demanded they get removed-was about 25 at this point-which they dutifully did, and not bothered me since.
Fucking stupid rule blindly enforced by people that should know better.