Letting NPs practice independently as doctors is increasingly viewed as a mistake, not a model that should be emulated more widely.
There are a lot of problems coming out of the fact that NPs are now basically practicing medicine in parallel with doctors despite vastly different education and training experience.
Many patients don’t even understand the difference. It doesn’t matter for common things like a simple sprain or common cold usually, but cases of medication overprescribing (think antibiotics for colds, etc) are commonly traced back to NPs and specialists will complain about the deluge of incorrect referrals from NPs who don’t know what they’re doing.
One example: I heard a specialist explain that they had to stop taking referrals for Ehlers-Danlos evaluation from NPs because the local NPs were referring people at impossibly high rates due to misdiagnosis. Ehlers-Danlos has become a popular (though incorrect) TikTok diagnosis for vague symptoms and rather than push back, many local NPs were running with it. Social media is full of people who are convinced they have Ehlers-Danlos and a lot of NPs were leaning into the trend instead of realizing that it’s not real.
There are a lot of problems coming out of the fact that NPs are now basically practicing medicine in parallel with doctors despite vastly different education and training experience.
Many patients don’t even understand the difference. It doesn’t matter for common things like a simple sprain or common cold usually, but cases of medication overprescribing (think antibiotics for colds, etc) are commonly traced back to NPs and specialists will complain about the deluge of incorrect referrals from NPs who don’t know what they’re doing.
One example: I heard a specialist explain that they had to stop taking referrals for Ehlers-Danlos evaluation from NPs because the local NPs were referring people at impossibly high rates due to misdiagnosis. Ehlers-Danlos has become a popular (though incorrect) TikTok diagnosis for vague symptoms and rather than push back, many local NPs were running with it. Social media is full of people who are convinced they have Ehlers-Danlos and a lot of NPs were leaning into the trend instead of realizing that it’s not real.