I wasn’t thinking about it in this way, but that makes sense. When I was a teenager I was going to a dermatologist for acne treatment. When I started college for whatever reason I wound up with appointments on Mondays a few times. This was probably around 2005 and while computerized calendars were a thing, mobile calendars were not widespread except with PDAs like Palm Pilot and I wasn’t using them, nor did I use a paper calendar to organize my schedule. In retrospect this was a bad idea with my then-undiagnosed ADHD. Anyway, the doctor’s office had this helpful automated phone reminder system that would call you the day before your appointment so if you needed to cancel/reschedule you could do it enough in advance that there wasn’t a penalty for late cancellation. The only problem was it didn’t take into account the weekends, so if your appointment was on a Monday it would call you on Sunday and if you canceled no one from the office would know until Monday morning and you’d get hit with a late cancellation fee. I think I actually did that 3 times and they sent me a letter saying they were dropping me as a patient. I felt that was unfair because their system should’ve been smart enough to call on Friday, but also I wasn’t really doing the prescribed acne treatments much at that point and I think I was getting old enough it kind of went away on its own around then anyways, so I didn’t mind not paying for the visits and medicine anymore. I’m still annoyed as an adult in my 40s, though, because I think that practice is supposed to have some of the better doctors in the area for skin cancer and I’m not sure if they’d still remember and not let me come if I ever needed treatment or screening for that.
Comment on Is there ever a situation where a doctor can legally refuse to render aid to someone?
MoonManKipper@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yes, many. In most cases a trained doctor has a moral, and maybe contractual, responsibility to help some one, not a legal one. There is no law that says ‘you are trained doctor, you have to help fix this broken leg’. Now if you egregiously refuse the various medical licensing authorities might take a dim view and you might loose your license to practice, but that’s not the same as breaking the law
jqubed@lemmy.world 1 week ago
morphballganon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Lose*
MoonManKipper@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Except, it seems, in Brazil. You learn something new every day