You could also go to Changgeng Hospital in LInkou and ask them to run some diagnostic tests for you and see another urologist. But from Sanxia to Taipei isn’t far either.
Taiwan’s medical system is far from perfect, one good thing is you can keep going to different hospitals and doctors until you find better treatment.
Another thing if you are new to Taiwan. Drink a LOT of water in the Summer to help reduce UTI and recurrence. Wear loose clothes. Need to keep things flowing.
Also cranberry juice. UTI are really common here , But of course you need to sort your current infection with the right antibiotics most likely.
Yepnthere are many excellent doctors although they may not have a lot of time to speak with you. You can keep asking them questions though in English and they may give you more time cos they like to speak English.
Changgeng hospitals . NTU hospital. Renai. Mackay. Ciji Hospital Xindian. Wanfang Hospital Muzha. Far East . Ask them to do some tests say previous treatments failed.
according to Google, it could be a norm to make a diagnosis and give treatment just based on symptoms for UTI, and lab test may be done when the treatment doesn’t work.
Correct. Doctors prescribe to failure.
The way they do things is like a car mechanic said, hey use this part , we know it doesn’t work for 20% of cars but we have no time to check your car now and it would be more expensive for you.
If it breaks down again next week come back to us. Except of course doctors and hospitals would never tell you so directly .
That’s the way medicine works.
Precision medicine would be checking for things like bacteria type, resistance plasmid genes and your genetic likelihood of side affects and also your ability to metabolise that drug at the first test. But that would.be costly and time consuming so instead you get the above traditional approach.
It takes a couple of days to get the results of an antimicrobial resistance test back (it used to take weeks, now a couple of days is possible or even less with certain tests, but not all antimicrobial resistance or adverse symptoms are predictable either ). In the meantime most of the patients would be cured with a first line antibiotic.
But I agree with your point. They should test for at least the basics with every patient e.g. bacteria or virus, what kind of bacteria. It should be mandatory. When we bring our car to a mechanic they plug in the car and use the laptop to run basic diagnostics first. A few basic diagnostics should be run for all patients.
That sounds real rough. I would get a second opinion from another doctor for sure. I had an issue and got 2 different results from the doctors so ya you never know
Happened to me in Canada. Started with a very polite question from me about some small technical thing. Dentist went on the defensive. Situation escalated to the point of me walking out. And I’m always the model of a well behaved dental patient
I’m sorry to hear about your subpar doctor experience, OP. My SO recently had to make a hospital visit to Cardinal Tien and everything went well. The doctors spoke English quite well and they were quite thorough.
(and yes, I would not call Sanxia the boonies either…maybe 20 years ago, lol)
if the hospital is En Zhu Gong
Mon to Fri
08:30~12:00 14:00~17:00 18:00~20:30
Sat 8:00~11:30
Next time if you should go to the hospital, I’d recommend to make a written list of everything you want to tell and ask to the doctor. Their reading ability may be better than listening.
I don’t understand what goes on with GP’s here, my Girlfriend who is Taiwanese goes to see doctor with a sore throat comes back with 7 different tablets to take 4 times a day for 7 days. 3 Types was strong painkillers and 2 standard.
SHOCKING!
As much as I prefer root causing before fixing something, alas, this is easier in computers than humans. Often enough the exact cause of a symptom is far from trivial to determine, so giving general antibiotics first for UTI seems a standard and legit way to easily help most people. For the few people where it doesn’t go away quickly, they should get more detailed analysis. By the way, depending on the antibiotics, 3 days can be perfectly fine for a complete cure. There are even successful 1 dose cures. Read the studies.
Self medication and doctor Google are fine for many things, but can lead to all kinds of silliness once one assumes all doctors are idiots and big pharma is out there to cheat or even kill one. Fuck these present days of disregard for science, logic and evidence.
By the way, my understanding was that antibiotics are NOT legally available over the counter. But, like with other prescription drugs, most pharmacies will sell you small amounts if you ask nicely.
The OPs experience was untypically bad though. As noted, good hospitals should have good English service. And Moxifloxacin? Yeah, that doc was probably not an urologist. Very sorry that you had this bad first impression of Taiwan health system. Normally it seems VERY good to me, but what you experienced was abysmal. Sorry for that!
Most of those drugs are old generics. Taiwan keeps the medical costs down for NHI by not always covering 2nd gen and beyond drugs and new brand name drugs when the older generic drugs work just as well at a fraction of the cost.
Another downside of NHI or positive depending on how you look at it. Less options to newer and brand name drugs if they work better for you. But cheaper generics for everyone.
Biggest reason for the unusually high medical cost in the US is because they always default to the most cutting edge of drugs, that is only marginally better than older generics but costs 10 times more.
Also having socialized medicine means a country can collectively bargain with drug companies to get better deals on newer drugs so they end up costing less to the consumer.
But you can only get it if they come to an agreement. And sometimes it takes a while before they do as well. . So new drugs and some drugs they didn’t come to an agreement on might not even be available.
A lot of people come to Taiwan and have this issue, their drug isn’t available and they need to take a different one. It’s one major issue with giving the state the power to dictate what is best for you. A drug might work better on 90% of the people compared to another and so the state makes the decision on that. But you might be the 10% who does better on the other drug.
Another problem is that Taiwan uses all the Euro trade names, back in the day when traveling home I used to take my kid’s prescription back with me and when I’d show it to a doctor, they’d be like, I’ve never fucking heard of any of these.
Used to be some states, I know Hawaii for sure, when you went to get a scrip filled, the pharmo was required by law to tell you about the generic (vastly cheaper, obviously) form of all the prescribed meds as an alternative, no matter what company’s version the Dr. had written down.
