My visit at the doctors office took 3 minutes and went down kind of like it does in Poland.

I sat down, the friendly female doctor asked me what was wrong, listened to my lungs, and took a quick look down my throat. Her conclusion was that I had a cold and that it wasn’t very bad. I said I felt much better now but that it had been coming and going the past two months and that it was much worse mornings and evenings. She said “aha..” and gave me three perscriptions for broad spectrum antibiotics, strong painkillers and eye drops. Just like that! Then she said, writing on her computer: “Oh, and you’re not allergic to anything, right?” I said: “Well actually I am to quite a lot of things..” And her response was “Aha, okay, so take this and if you don’t get better you come back! …NEXT PLEASE!”

It’s maybe better than in Sweden where you sometimes have to wait for two months to get an appointment with a doctor. And when you finally enter their office they speak to you very slowly and talk about feelings and then you get out of there with instructions to eat some paracetamol and stay in bed when you are actually falling apart. In Sweden antibiotics are something you might get just before dying or when having a very bad infection – if they believe you.

So, what’s better? Going fast and overmedicating the whole population or ineffectively treating adults like stupid puppies and waste tons of time and money while assuming that people ask for medication they don’t need – thus not providing it?

I’ll wait another day and if tomorrow morning is bad I might be following doctors orders.