Dear GP who doesn't want to give my daughter or I flu vaccines:
https://climatejustice.social/@bacigalupe/109591674586129214
(We get them anyway. Because if there's one thing I've learned here in Switzerland, it's that you have to go around the system when the system doesn't give a shit about you.)
Huh?
First, I'm surprised that this'd involve the GP at all (Impfapotheken cover the city of Zurich very densely and there's one or two in every larger town in the canton). Secondly, huh? I'm truly confused why would a GP mind doing that. What was the reasoning, if you don't mind?
@robryk Sorry, that came out snarkier than intended. We've had a terrible experience with multiple instances of Swiss medicine in the last years and I'm... opinionated because of it. Having a teen who is between old enough for a GP and a pediatrician and having doctors who have much less medical training than my home country (this is also true of Germany, but I think the problem is worse here because it's so hard to hang on to a GP) has made for an annoying experience.
Don't worry, I don't particularly mind non-misleading and correct snark :)
What _is_ worse for me is that I used to have a splendid way of looking for reasonable specialists in Poland: ask my (former) pediatrician for recommendations (in all cases I remember spanning my childhood to when I was twenty-something this always yielded people who would actually think, and would happily answer your questions).
@robryk I miss this too. I was lucky in Germany - I had a very good GP in Munich who was able to recommend other good docs. Luxembourg was hit-or-miss, though the care was all high quality. France was nightmarish - some doctors wouldn't even see me if I didn't know someone. And here it's just so hard to even find a good GP, and if you do, they leave to go somewhere else a year after you find them :(
And I've just learned that he's died last year.
So, in the spirit of making people's passing not-totally-sad (as in, it's better that they've existed and died compared to them not existing at all), some anecdotes about Dr. Włodzimierz Borkowski:
He specialized in neonatology. I don't remember how I know this, but one of the reasons for that was that he himself had joint problems that made walking over non-level surfaces hard for him that were caused by some perinatal issues.
He would treat his patients, whether young or adult, as people who should know what he's thinking. Apart from him actually answering questions of children (and not just saying something to make the child be satisfied), he'd point-blank admit when he didn't know something, or wasn't sure. (This created very polarized opinions about him among patients.)
So, something that happened at least once to my parents was that we went to see him (I don't remember what the problem was anymore, probably something related to pollen allergy); he in the end didn't have a good guess on the underlying cause, so he said so, gave some advice on symptom avoidance, asked us to try to make some observations, and to come back in 2 weeks or so. A few days later my parents got a phonecall: he thought about it in the meantime and had a new idea, that he wanted them to try.
@robryk He sounds like an amazing doctor :)
> Sometimes things happen that are not within your experience :)
Yes, this one was far enough that I was very surprised.
> Unfortunately, it's not uncommon in CH.
Hm~ given the popularity of things like homeopathy I can see that being the case :(.
And now I realized that I assumed that the MD requirement consisted of the MD giving a prescription for the vaccination, and that being realizable by a pharmacy, which is probably not the case :/.
@robryk Yeah, sorry about that.
My experience was European medicine and systems in general was very different when I was in a different role - being a parent - especially a single mother - exposes you to a whole different level of systems that is completely invisible otherwise :(
@robryk Part of why I get so mad is that this wasn't my experience before and is much worse than I expect :(
@robryk I have a daughter who is not old enough to be vaccinated in the pharmacy.
Sometimes things happen that are not within your experience :) I think my GP in an antivaxxer, frankly.
Unfortunately, it's not uncommon in CH.
The other distinct possibility (this is why most GPs won't vaccinate for COVID in CH) is that they don't get paid as much for the vaccination as they do for other things, and there aren't really enough GPs to go around here, so they can get away with it.