It's a funny thing. I am not so sure the 'quality' of horse care in the US is so much worse than human care. To my way of thinking, it's far better. Vets, good ones, are very good at saying what it likely is, and what the best approach is to both get the horse good care and economize. They have a sense of what makes sense to do.
I have on a number of occasions, been scared to death by my doctor (you never want to hear a doc say, 'Um....have you had your brain MRI'd lately?') and undertaken a long series of difficult and expensive tests, only to find out I had something very ordinary that was manageable with a few simple changes, even had the many specialists I was sent to laugh in my face about such things being remotely possible or likely, given the imaging I had. At the same time I've had extremely obvious diagoses totally miscalled, and symptoms I reported dismissed with a wave of the hand and a 'You aren't having that symptom'. Oh excuse me. I could have sworn I did.
I've also been told I couldn't have medicine A because some tests had shown there was a slightly elevated risk of stroke in a very, very large population sample, when those who had the strokes had a large number of other risk factors known to be associated with strokes. BUT I was perfectly free to get the medication from an OB/GYN, that would be fine. Why is it ok to get it from an OB/GYN and not from a Family Med doctor that was primary care? That question was never answered.
We spend an immense amount of money in health care chasing after very unlikely issues, when the doctor should look for the common case and look for 'horses, not zebras'. I also think doctors often need to read up more on common problems - I've had several ordinary conditions which a doctor did not know many of the common symptoms it could cause.
At the same time, many of the very ill people seem to be ignored, statistics about large groups become why a mamogram would not be recommended, say, until a certain age because of a percentage of 'false positives' that might cause people to get 'expensive' biopsies that turn out to be ok - Such reasoning is ridiculous. A person who gets CANCER costs much much more to care for - it's worth it to 'blow' 1K on an unecessary biopsy to catch the X number of people who DO have cancer, because that's going to cost hundreds of times more than the few unnecessary biopsies. Managed care and insurance companies are using statistics to avoid paying for preventative care like mamograms.
I think we need more sensible guidelines in practicing medicine.
