Dr. Steven Novella

And this is what I'm not doing and why I'm not doing that, which is a critical thing that most people do forget to do.

Because they're going to ask you that, why didn't you do this?

So you might as well get ahead of the curve and say, the endoscopy was not indicated for this reason, whatever, prior to doing whatever.

You just give the reason, give the references.

The good thing about EMRs now, electronic medical record, is you could have macros where you just say, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time.

You just say,

All right, I got a standard migraine referral.

Boom, here is the standard thing that I want general practitioners to know so that they don't send us people who just need to stop drinking caffeine, right?

Because otherwise you get these references, referrals that really should have been dealt with at an earlier stage.

And we see teaching the community as part of our mandate.

So just to clarify, they don't send you a referral now?

Because that's like, you can't even bill technically until you've done that.

Right, right, right, right.

But again, from the specialist point of view, it's like in order to bill as a specialist, you have to have gotten a referral and you have to communicate back to the referral.

If you don't close that loop, the billing is fraudulent.

You have not justified the billing.

So, I mean, you know, the research shows, right, that there are some social benefits to being part of a community.

And so if you ask the question, are people who are part of a religious community happier, do they live longer, whatever, the answer is usually yes.

But my interpretation of literature is that that's because they're part of a community.

Like, that's the key element, not that the community has some magical belief in religion or God or whatever, whatever your belief system is.