[bryony]

Do you have a preference one way or the other for a male or female doctor/nurse?

Definitely female.

Out of curiosity, is there a major difference with how the UK and US healthcare treats conditions like gynecomastia when they are benign? I don't get why the doctor would make you see a specialist just for refusing treatment. Excluding individuals like us who want to grow breasts, I think there's plenty of reasons to refuse treatment: complications from surgery, side-effects from medication, etc.

I was thinking more along the lines of why I would not want to go through an investigation into the cause may give them cause for concern. (Medicine is nice in the US. You just find a doctor, make an appointment and give them a credit card and you are pretty much a client/customer. I had four years of that and it was great. Here, it's taxpayer funded, which should mean that I am a client/customer, but you sometimes get the impression that the government forgets that its our money, and its treated as a "benefit" - which it is, I suppose if you haven't paid as much tax as I have in the past. )

Anyway, here you only have one provider with records that follow you around, so if you get fed up and go somewhere else, the next team will know all about it, etc. I guess that's the main difference.

B.