“What’s Wrong With You?”

Don’t get sick anywhere but at home:

…doctors in Tanzania complete less than a quarter of the essential checklist for patients with classic symptoms of malaria, a disease that kills 63,000-96,000 Tanzanians each year.  The public-sector doctor in India asks one (and only one) question in the average interaction: "What’s wrong with you?".  In Paraguay, the amount of time a doctor spends with a patient has nothing to do with the severity of the patient’s illness…these isolated facts represent common patterns…three years of medical school in Tanzania result in only a 1 percentage point increase in the probability of a correct diagnosis…One concern with measuring doctor effort through direct observation is that the doctor may work harder in the presence of the research team.

That is from "The Quality of Medical Advice in Low-Income Countries," by Jishnu Das, Jeffrey Hammer, and Kenneth Leonard, in the Spring 2008 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.  The editor is now Andrei Shleifer and this issue is one of the best in a long time.