In today’s health care jungle, it seems everyone wants to be a doctor. Pharmacists are handing out medical opinions and diagnosis and performing blood investigations. Insurers and third-party administrators (TPAs) are second-guessing prescriptions, and even claims officers are deciding what treatments patients “deserve.”
The only people now fighting to practise medicine are the doctors themselves.
This creeping encroachment on medical judgement is not progress — it’s peril. Pharmacists are masters of medication safety, and their role in preventing errors is beyond question.
But some have begun assuming the mantle of diagnostician, interpreting symptoms, and recommending alternative drugs or dosing changes without full clinical context. That isn’t collaboration; it’s substitution, and patients are the ones who bear the risk.
Equally troubling is the growing interference by TPAs and insurers. What was once administrative support has become clinical intrusion. Doctors now find themselves having to “justify” their decisions to non-medically trained officers whose chief objective is cost containment, not patient welfare.
When some anonymous clerk sitting in an office far away start vetoing prescriptions and approving care based on spreadsheets rather than symptoms, the very foundation of health care collapses.
Let’s be clear: medicine is not a guessing game, nor a customer-service exercise. Diagnosis requires deep knowledge, patient history, physical examination, and accountability — none of which can be outsourced to the counter, the call centre, or the claims desk.
Every professional has a rightful lane, and stepping out of it doesn’t make the system efficient — it makes it unsafe.
The irony is that while everyone else is trying to be a doctor, the doctors are drowning in paperwork and defending their expertise to those without medical qualifications. If this misplaced enthusiasm continues, patients will soon have nowhere to turn for genuine clinical judgment.
Health care needs cooperation, not confusion. Pharmacists should protect medication safety. TPAs should process claims transparently. And doctors must be allowed to practise medicine, without interference from those who claim to know better but don’t bear the burden when things go wrong.
Because in the end, when everyone acts like a doctor, no one truly takes responsibility. And in that chaos, the patient always loses. The access to your local friendly general practitioner (GP) will not be an immediate walk like now, but by appointments, maybe in a few days’ time, just like the First World country which Malaysia is aspiring to be.
Dr Pearl Leong is a general practitioner based in Kuala Lumpur.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
