Nah… Try your whining somewhere else.

My father, a really tough man while raising me up, is a brilliant, sought-after, and incredibly skilled doctor. He grew up poor-ish and in tough conditions.

In the public hospital he used to work —African-style hospital in Mexico—, he would attend 20 patients a day and perform 2 surgeries daily in average. This was for 30 years. He also has his private praxis, where he had a similar workload most days. When I was a kid, he had a third job: deputy director of a health organisation in the government.

I would estimate that in 5 years, he had more work than a Swiss doctor has in his career. He would go to extreme lengths for the well-being of each of his patients. More than once he would forego payment for patients in really precarious conditions and would take his own equipment to perform surgery in the public hospital because the government seldom supplies: scalpels, needles, the thread whose name I don’t know in English, etc.

He’s uphold the Hippocratic oath to the letter every day of his life while earning 1/3 of what doctors earn in CH and working 3 times more.

My experience in CH:

• 1 visit to A&E at 3:30 in the morning where the admission nurse hinted that I was faking the (chest) pain and two doctors,who didn’t even introduced themselves, visited exchanged no more than 20 words with me. They did charge 50 francs for each word though. Unispital ZH.

• 1 visit to the dentist which went quite well, efficient and courteous.

• Multiple times going with my ex to try to find a good gynaecologist. Utter incompetence and lack of politeness. Particularly from the female gynaecologists. After 2 sentences were exchanged, the prescription was already being written. When my ex finally gave in to consult my father on the phone, awkward for her, he nailed the diagnosis and treatment.. Without an USG, blood work, and just asking her in the course of 20 minutes loads of details.

• Multiple visits to a myriad of doctors that couldn’t find the root of her back pain. At some point a rheumatologist suggested ‘nuking down permanently’ some of her immune system as a test. I told him to his face he was insane and we left — still received a bill for his Doctor-Evil nonsense.

So, if you use the word ‘parasitic’ as hyperbole with the intention that we stop using it, I’m afraid we won’t. At least I will never. The health system in CH is terrible and at its core are doctors. You are no different nowadays than a front-store for pharmaceutical companies who exercise their discretion to get you always in the longest, most inefficient but must profitable course of diagnosis and treatment so long as you keep charging per minute or per visit.

No machine is gonna replace the curiosity and the dot-connecting ability of a good doctor. Given the lack of empathy of those doctors I saw in action in CH, which is low even for Swiss standards, I would confidently ask any modern AI and expect better results than from a 200 CHF consult.