skipsaur

I love how accessible learning is, and how generous people are with sharing knowledge. There's so much amazing free content for you to learn how to do just about anything.

I love that it makes it easier for me to travel. I love travelling and the internet has great tools--I can book accommodations, flights, even street view the route from the train station to my hotel in a place on the other side of the world. All this would've been so much harder beforehand, and I feel more confident to travel and more connected with places I go, people I meet.

I love that it's a living record. Yes, there are people that use the internet to do harm, like any tool, but that harm and their misdeeds are documented and public for posterity to judge. The good things are also documented. I can look back at photos of a beloved bakery that closed 10 years ago. Unfortunately, it's much harder finding info and pictures of a beloved bakery that closed 30 years ago.

Hi, disclaimer: I'm from the US so I'm used to a large amount of profiteering in our health system, not sure if this question is applicable in the UK:

Have you seen/do you anticipate any price increases from your wholesalers in response to shortages? If so, are you concerned at all about your businesses' ability to absorb/adjust to any fluctuations?

Is it legal currently for British citizens to purchase medication from other countries within the E.U.? If so, will Brexit have any effect/prohibit this, or is it an option if there are shortages in the UK and people are desperate/don't really have treatment-switching options? ("Medical tourism" is a big thing in the US, when a plane ticket to India or SEA can easily cost less than 1 month supply of some meds.)

Familiarize themselves with resources. My PCP did great, she had a list of area offices with their contact info and even better, what major insurances they took and their office hours. Can't tell you how handy this was (so I could cross of the ones that don't take my insurance or couldn't work with my schedule). It was a 1-pager that probably only took a couple hours to put together, but it was a great resource and I like leaving appointments with written instructions for how to proceed. She even circled a few she knew personally.

Normally, this is the kind of information mining and organizing that I looove. I enjoy whipping up spreadsheets. But with depression, simple tasks like doing this kind of research is draining or downright impossible, so it helped so much that she did the first few steps for me.

As for PCPs and prescriptions, it's a two-edged sword. On one hand if you have a PCP that knows what they're doing, that has an office/schedule who can handle the additional visits/monitoring necessary with starting someone on antidepressants, that's great. Plenty of offices without these resources don't have all this but do it anyway if they're the patient's best option for care at that time.

Optimally you find a psychiatrist to handle the meds and therapist but if basic meds are working and you're not dealing with anything too severe, I think a combo of PCP+therapist can work. If you've been bouncing from med to med and it's not working, you definitely need a psychiatrist/therapist who work together so they can monitor your meds more closely and because the psychiatrist will be better specialized and up to date with all the new options than your PCP. I feel like in mental health situations, the therapist kind of takes on that PCP provider role where they will have the best vantage of your situation and they're the most essential, so it makes sense to make their jobs easier by choosing either a PCP or psychiatrist that they can collaborate with to optimize your care. In my case, my PCP was wonderful at her job but she's not a therapist and way too busy to handle the situation with the attention it needed, so I'm glad she directed me to the right person, a therapist who was the right fit for me.

Sounds like insurance is playing a part in this. With VA coverage, you might be mandated to go to the VA. It might not be that civilian hospitals are forcing you to go, but if you stay at a civilian hospital you'd likely have a much larger, possibly unaffordable bill compared to going to the VA. Even if you say okay and they don't think you're going to be good for $100k afterward, the civilian hospital probably won't take you. For people that could afford to pay cash prices well into thousands a day, sure, you can pick your civilian hospital. Odds of that happening for anyone who's not in the 0.01%?

Does the NHS have control over what the wholesalers can charge you? For example, have you ever had a situation where NHS payment fell short of what you paid for the drug?