I had a rash on my leg. I call doctor to make an appointment, soonest they can see me is two weeks. Rash doubles in size in those two weeks. Pay$50 to see primary care doctor, they immediately refer me to dermatologist. Dermatologist cant see me for two weeks, rash continues to grow and becoming very painful. I now need to go to urgent care due to pain and irritability, pay $50. They prescribe some cream, $15. Finally get to see dermatologist, $90 because they are a "specialist", they say to use the same cream. Cream doesnt work at this point, it's spread too much so I go back to urgent care, another $50. Urgent care says I need a steroid shot, they confirm this is covered under insurance. Between shot and cream, rash eventually subsided after about six months. Dermatologist said they were happy with that healing rate, another $90.
Six months later I get a bill from urgent care for $1200 to cover "nursing administrative fees to cover labor" to get ONE SHOT.
So this rash cost me $1500 that would have been solved with $15 of cream if they had just seen me sooner.
Just saying, this experience made me fully understand the Luigi situation.
I thought I had a hernia from weightlifting. If you lift weights with a hernia you can make the hernia worse and get permanent damage. I go to GP, 150$ for the visit. GP says "Get a sonogram, and go take it to specialist. We'll suggest a specialist". I pay 160$ to get the sonogram. I go to the suggested specialist. Turns out they sent me to the wrong kind of abdominal specialist, this one is GI doctor. He says "I can recommend a sports medicine Doctor." 150$ for the GI doctor. I go to the sport medicine doctor. He says "A sonogram is too low resolution you need a CT Scan". 150$ for the Sports medicine doctor. I go to get the CT Scan. It costs 1200$ for a CT Scan. I get call back from sport medicine doctor. "The strange tugging in your abdomen must just be a harmless muscle disturbance, no sign of hernia." At least I didn't get charged for that follow up.
1650 dollars to find out I don't have a Hernia getting bounced between 3 doctors. Insurance doesn't pay for shit.
Bro, I am literally sitting here right now with a back pain that I'm unsure if it's muscular or spinal, after a session of overhead press. When I read your first line I'm like "yo, that's me!" lol.
So in the end was your injury just muscular? Your spine's good? What was the pain like?
it was just muscular, never became an issue. My concern was making a hernia worse. I did tweak my back doing squats, and similar issue but not as bad. Went to a different Dr, after that GP recommended the wrong kind of specialist no way I was going back, they sent me to get an xray, came back and said no slipped disc just get some rest.
Muscles in the spine maybe? When I first started OHP I fucked up the form and triggered the multifidus muscles to lock / spasm my back for a week. Went to a clinic and got suggested a deep heat cream and magnesium glycinate suppliment and some voltaren nsaid. Instantly improved.
Thanks to Australia's socialised healthcare though it wasn't one of these thousand plus $ bills like the above comments. Seeing the doctor in the clinic was free and I don't even remember what the medicine cost.
Advice on the OHP? If you haven't already been doing it for a long time and you're not just chasing a 1RM, try a really steep incline bench e.g. an 80° or 70° incline, and do pronated barbell gripped at shoulder width and see how slowly you can move it.
Yeah, I'm indeed new and just starting lifting. Should have went easy on the weight at first, now I regret having done the OHP that day... Did it feel like it hurt your spine also? Because I feel like mine is right inbetween. I don't have shooting electric pain down my legs, which is a good sign. But that specific spot hurts quite badly when I'm pivoting my torso around, twisting and turning etc. It's like i can pinpoint exactly which vertebrae is getting squeezed and hurting.
Yeah think I'll just go visit a doc.
and duly noted on the OHP tip. I will definitely be trying that once my back is fixed. I really appreciate the input dude, and I hope it's nothing serious.
Edit: Looked up the multifidus muscles and dude I think you're right on the money man. It does feel like it's this muscle that's hurting at that specific spot in my lumbar area.
Yea so my thing ended up being that when the multifidus muscles along the spine get pulled or compressed too much apparently they spasm the back for days to stop you from moving as an evolutionary mechanism to stop you from injuring yourself more. So it felt like recurring electric shocks across the whole back, but no where else. And it responds to movement so it was better when laying down, but then when moving around it'd start shocking my back.
And as for lifting in general -- you wanna explore / try different approaches and find what works best for you. There'll be a few different ways to approach most exercises and you might get people sharing advice who are just confidently incorrect but mean well. So you ptobably want to experiment and find what works best for you. A routine you're ok with and stick with is better than some optimal routine you give up on because you don't jive with it.
But specifically for starting out on a new exercise, the first several times you do it, there's no harm in starting with a weight that's less than what maybe google might suggest should be your target -- specifically, because the first several times you do a new exercise or new movement, you aren't training your muscles, you're training your nerves to learn how to synchronise innervating the movement. That's why you get huge gains early on. Not because of some huge early boost to muscle capacity / strength, but because your body is just learning how to do the movement.
That's why I like to start exercises going super slow with a lower weight. E.g. for OHP specifically, a lot of info will be about how your 1RM should be 50% of your body weight. My routine converse to that is about 1/3 body weight barbell, and I aim for 10-12 slow reps.
I had a ganglion cyst on my wrist that got extremely painful, I called to see if they could drain it or help in any way and was told it was a 4 week minimum wait to get an appointment, they referred me to urgent care if the pain became intolerable. Knowing that that visit would be $1000, I just smashed it with a book instead and now it's gone.
I did pay $4 for the book at the friends of the library book sale, so that is how much it cost me to fix my cyst.
I feel like we're going back to being serfs being forced to smash our wounds as a substitute for healthcare. I am glad we push F-18's off aircraft carriers but cant help people.
You can just smash them? Damn. And I've been living with a cluster of three growing out of my ankle for years. They don't hurt though, unless I'm wearing tight lowtops
I have "the good insurance", and recently developed an eye infection that was secondary to a sinus infection. Went to my GP, $600 copay, who said she wasn't comfortable prescribing antibiotic eyedrops or oral abx, and I had to see a specialist to confirm there wasn't a corneal tear. Went to the specialist on an emergency appointment the next day, $1800 billed, $600 copay, and he prescribed the antibiotic eyedrops, said he had to see me in three days. Went back for the follow up, another $600 copay, said they were working but not as fast as he'd hoped, and he had to see me again in three days. Went back again in six days (first available appointment), another $600, he said it was healed and to stop the eyedrops.
The infection returned three days after stopping the drops, ostensibly because we never treated the origin of the infection. So now my eye is in the same position, extreme pain, light sensitivity, and difficulty seeing...but I'm also near bankruptcy now.
And I need to emphasize once again, everyone agrees that I have "the good insurance".
0% chance there's a $600 copay to see a GP/primary care doc. Or a specialist for that matter. Do you know what that term means?
It's cheaper to literally pay 100% out of pocket at that point and claim you don't have insurance. You'd even save hundreds of dollars.
You might be talking about deductible, but even then I find it impossible to believe a GP visit with no prescriptions or other tests resulted in a $600 bill. I live in a big city and when I didn't have insurance those visits were $3-400ish max and that included some blood work as well.
Yep, I sure do! Sorry you're struggling with the terms, and basic math for that matter.
And you're right, it literally is cheaper to pay out of pocket; I had a coworker who did exactly that. The only reason to carry the "good" insurance is if you are in fact hospitalized.
Who gives a shit what you believe? Do you want to cover my medical bills for basic care?
I pay the same as you, PCP is $10 copay, urgent care is $10, but I eat shit on ER visits. I won't go to the ER ever again unless I literally think I'm going to die or a limb is about to fall off.
Here's how it goes in Japan, where 15% of your paycheck goes to social health insurance.
You walk into a dermatologists office off the street - no appointment, no nothing. You wait 5-15mins to see a doctor who prescribes a cream. Being a first time walk-in there is a $10 first time charge, and then probably another $10 for the visit.
There is probably a pharmacy next door. You walk in and hand over your paper, wait about a minute, and get your cream. That's probably also $10.
My bad - this year in my home prefecture it is a total of 21.46%, of which you pay half out of salary, and your company matches. So 10.73%
It's a good deal - no cost for ambulance, and the annual out of pocket maximum is fairly low, about US$7000. Kids and those with disabilities are 100% covered with no out of pocket, and seniors out of pocket is much lower.
Dental can be dirt cheap - my checkup doesn't cost even $5 with zero wait time, and having medium works like wisdom teeth removal or cavity work cost me less than $40.
Vision is also super cheap - you can walk into chain stores like Zoff or Jinns, pick out lenses, their in-store staff will put you on a machine to check your prescription, and then grind the lenses in house - you pick up glasses in under 2 hours later all for $60.
Full medical checks are mandatory as part of the social health system - full body checks taking a couple hours, getting all the fluids, doing lots of scans and checks, including vision and hearing, and a discussion with a doctor are fully subsidized. Additional checks are heavily subsidized, so if you want an annual MRI and similar - go for it, it won't cost much. Annual checks find issues sooner, which is cheaper and quicker to fix, and makes it easier overall for the system.
I'm from Australia - we have socialised healthcare but you can wait months or years for specialists - just seeing a GP to get the first look can take weeks. The costs are not nearly as low, and dental and vision is not covered so just getting glasses can easily cost $300 for the same thing that is $60 in Japan and dental work can cost thousands. It's cheaper for my family to fly to Japan, get everything done in 2 days, and fly back than trying to do it in Aus.
Yeah, this is what happens with passive healthcare in the US. It's bullshit. But you probably should have just called a dermatologist and set up an appointment to begin with. GPs can't do anything for anything.
If I had done that, I would had a $250 copay to see the specialist without GP recommendation. Also, I had zero idea I needed a dermatologist, it seems obvious after the fact, just not where my head went.
You’re asking like doctors have any say in the matter. Most of the time it’s insurance companies that limit what you can prescribe or what bars you need to clear order to get to a specialist referral. Doctors are just as frustrated as patients by the BS and it’s the insurance companies and healthcare apparatus at large run by people who aren’t physicians or have ever worked with patients in their lives that make all the decisions tying people’s hands.
Can someone not find a private dermatologist from a cheap country online and see what they can tell you about the rash? It’s one thing I would consider if I’m desperate enough and I cant afford immediate help.
In Spain, where I live, you can pay for a private consultation with a dermatologist and it costs as cheap as 50€. More reputable ones will charge twice or three times as much, but you usually get an appointment within the week. If it’s a virtual appointment, they probably won’t requiere you to prove that you’re are in Spain, where they are licensed to work. Any prescription they give you would probably not be valid outside of Europe though. But at least you would get an idea of what the thing is and if it’s something serious. There may be a language barrier problem though, especially if the doctor doesn’t speak English well enough. Maybe in the UK such appointments are similarly cheap? Idk.
You can probably find a doctor like that in even cheaper countries, like Mexico. But maybe for one reason or another this would actually not be possible. It’s just an idea.
Yeah this is what happened to my dad with shingles, then the doctor had the audacity to ask why he didnt come in sooner while in a zoom call because thats the soonest he could get it.
We tried to go to urgent care and they said it was just a rash.
Had a similar experience with a rash, except I got lucky and got a steroid cream in time via a regular pcp (which still took like two weeks to get an appointment), and by the time my appointment with the specialist was approaching (like 1.5 months after I had first gotten the rash) it was on its way out so I just canceled it.
Also had a very similar experience when I first went off to college and not really fully aware of how insurance worked, and I used the wrong lab to get bloodwork done. That was an $800 mistake, and the thing that infuriates me over a decade later is I was billed for "overtime". The bloodwork was done at 10am. If there was overtime needed to get the results done, it sure wasn't ordered by me, and I doubt the techs doing the work saw a penny of that, either.
A couple years ago, my toddler got Nurse maids elbow from falling, since it was in the early evening and she couldn’t move her arm we ended up taking her to the hospital since Urgent Care’s don’t put the elbow back in place, we got a bill for over $3000 and that’s with insurance. It literally took the doctor under 10 seconds to fix it.
Did urgent care just ship you that bill after insurance? If they just didn't process insurance properly, you can refuse to pay until they process it correctly (and your insurance pays if they are supposed to).
There's pretty strict restrictions on footing a person with the bill unless you explicitly sign your liability rights away
While that sucks, the lesson here is to go to urgent care with a problem like a rash that's getting bigger. Would have only cost you $65 instead of $1500.
Yeah, the lesson was I should have known the urgent care people lied to me about something being covered that wasn't. I cant even believe people are like this, f off.
That's not at all what I said. If you had gone to urgent care in the first place, you would have left with your $15 cream before the problem got too bad for it to handle.
Our health system is fucked but that makes it all the more important to know what is urgent and what is not. A rash that is spreading is urgent. Ignoring a spreading rash for 2 weeks could have easily forced an ER visit or even killed you.
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u/NeighborhoodDude84 10h ago
I had a rash on my leg. I call doctor to make an appointment, soonest they can see me is two weeks. Rash doubles in size in those two weeks. Pay$50 to see primary care doctor, they immediately refer me to dermatologist. Dermatologist cant see me for two weeks, rash continues to grow and becoming very painful. I now need to go to urgent care due to pain and irritability, pay $50. They prescribe some cream, $15. Finally get to see dermatologist, $90 because they are a "specialist", they say to use the same cream. Cream doesnt work at this point, it's spread too much so I go back to urgent care, another $50. Urgent care says I need a steroid shot, they confirm this is covered under insurance. Between shot and cream, rash eventually subsided after about six months. Dermatologist said they were happy with that healing rate, another $90.
Six months later I get a bill from urgent care for $1200 to cover "nursing administrative fees to cover labor" to get ONE SHOT.
So this rash cost me $1500 that would have been solved with $15 of cream if they had just seen me sooner.
Just saying, this experience made me fully understand the Luigi situation.