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Peculiariaties of French medicine
May 9th, 2007 | 
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You might think that medical treatment in France would be pretty much the same as it is elsewhere in the world once you get to the point of visiting the doctor, but it isn’t.
Certainly there are the obvious differences in how the various healthcare schemes are run. So, in the UK everything is free but there are waiting lists. In France, everything costs but there aren’t any waiting lists.
Expectations of the patients are quite different too. For example, because the French like to come away from the doctor with something after their visit, the number of medicines prescribed is massive. James had bronchitus last year and in the UK he’d have had a single bottle of medicine yet in France he ended up with that bottle plus tablets plus an inhaler plus appointments at the physiotherapist. Did he get better faster though? Well, no, so there wasn’t really any point in all the additional treatments.
The doctors have no consideration of any modesty that you might have either so almost always it’s “strip off, yes, everything” which is something to bear in mind. Such differences have resulted in there being training sessions for doctors in areas with a high brit expat population.
I wonder though if Doctor Bobo realises that his potential brit clientele is a good deal smaller than it might be if he didn’t advertise himself as a clown?
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.The BlogCatalog My Neighbourhood Train
Assorted link trains seem to be the flavour of the season from the original Technorati Favourites Exchange (still plugging a way a month down the line), to the MyBlogLog train (on a slower line) and now we have the BlogCatalog My Neighbourhood train which I came across at SYAF the Geek just yesterday.
***Start Copying Here:***
Here are the rules:
1) Write a short introduction about how you found this list and include a link back to that blog.
2) COPY the rules and ENTIRE list below and post it on your blog.
3) Take My New Neighborhoods Members’ and move them into the The Original Neighborhoods Members’ list.
4) Find 3 new blogs, join their Blogcatalog Neighborhoods and add them to the My New Neighborhoods Members’ section. Remember to also add the Join this Neighborhood’ link next to your new blogs. ( Example: http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/syaf-the-geek.html )
5) Join as a member to each Neighborhoods listed here by clicking on Join this Neighborhood’. The goal is that all of the new Members listed will join your neighborhood, and you should do the same!
My New Neighborhoods Members
The originals
- Foreign Perspectives Join This Neighborhood
- MdRafi2k Join This Neighborhood
- ByDesign Join This Neighborhood
- Blog To Profit Join This Neighborhood
- Another Maria Join This Neighborhood
- Webee Join This Neighborhood
- Zakman Join This Neighborhood
- One Eyed View Join This Neighborhood
- Syaf The Geek Join this Neighborhood
- Esplanade Join This Neighborhood
- Wampago Join This Neighborhood
- WonderWoman Join This Neighborhood
- Kucau Join This Neighborhood
- Cymru66 Join This Neighborhood
***End Copying Here***
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for dummies; Techie blog reviews
As ‘yall know, I’ve been one of the participants of the Technorati Favourites Exchange (TFX) over the last few weeks which had the aim of getting a whole bunch of people into the top 100 favourited blogs list on Technorati. It’s been very successful too with the composition of that top 100 changing entirely.
So far, I’ve not yet made it as the barrier seems to move up every time I think I’m about to get in at number 100 but I’m not really that bothered as I’ve learnt far more over the last couple of weeks about promoting FP than I would otherwise have done in months if not years. Anyway, I thought I’d share some of that with you here.
First off, it’s very clear that the way to go with the adsense ads is the big square block that you see on FP these days. That’s the one that all the big money making blogs use and when we talk big money, one clocked up $8500 in March.
Getting the traffic up is key to that $8500 of course and with that in mind I’m pleased to see that the link exchanges that are part and parcel of the TFX have moved me into the top 40k of blogs with well over 100 incoming links to date. If you get the chance, it’s definitely worthwhile participating in one of the many link trains around.
What’s also quite useful in increasing the income from the blog/website is to improve the ranking of Alexa and Google. Now, google is staffed with some smart cookies so it’s not too easy to outsmart them and, by and large, what you need to do is to bump up the number of incoming links over a period of time. Naturally that means that your Google ranking isn’t going to go from zero to seven in a couple of months and indeed it’s taken me about eight months to get to PR4 with FP and, all being well, it’ll be at PR5 or perhaps PR6 at the next review (due around July).
However, Alexa is a completely different story. What’s clear is that being in the top 100k sites in Alexa brings in significant cash benefits in that people are prepared to pay more for links from such a site, for you to write articles about them, etc. if you’re in that top 100k. The Alexa people seem to be a completely dumber bunch than those at Google (sorry guys, but it looks like that from here) though and it seems to sufficient merely to download the Alexa toolbar and just look at your own site. Doing that has knocked off 100k from my ranking in a matter of days and I’m not even milking it by just sitting and hitting refresh either. Will it be possible to get into the top 100k doing that though? I think it will as friends of ours with a broadly similar “real” readership are bouncing along at around 100k yet with the location of the readership obviously completely squewed by them accessing their own pages.
What’s also clear is that there’s a whole lot of people out there who think that throwing together a blog is a doddle as everything is totally automated. Well, not quite everything is automated and I’ve picked up loads of great ideas from looking at the various blogs participating in the TFX which I’m gradually incorporating into FP.
If anyone’s interested, I can do a little technical review of their site and point out the various things that they could usefully do to get the traffic up. All I’m asking for the moment is that you do a little article mentioning Foreign Perspectives on your own blog. I’ll consider reviewing non-blog sites too but that would be a chargeable thing.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.The RSS Link Train
Thanks to Nia for putting me on to Bob’s new Feed My Feed game, this will help increase the estimated RSS feed on ReviewMe.com.
So here is how the game is played:
The Feed Link Chain is a blog Link game that is gaining in popularity within the blogosphere. Unlike other blog games which focused on getting backlinks, this one is going to help you increase your Feed Readers.
All you have to do is
(1) Add your name and the feed link to the chain along with the names and feeds of three blogs that you would like to include.
(2) Simply publish the new list to your blog and allow your readers to participate in the game by continuing the chain!
(3) Link back to me in your post and make a comment HERE with the three sites you’ve added; I’ll add them to the list on my site so that others, when copying the list from my site will be propagating your three as well!
All the blogs mentioned in the chain are worth reading so do add them to your feeds and spread the word around.
Visit Feedburner for a URL feed for each site if you don’t already have that.
The List:
Buying a house in France: part 19: Post Office and Co-Operative bank accounts in France
For historic reasons, the various post offices and co-operative banking organisations in Europe maintain loose connections with their opposite numbers in other countries and it’s therefore often useful to open accounts with these organisations before you move.For instance, the co-operative bank offer a service called Tipanet which offers quite cheap international money transfers: around £8 as compared to the £25 that a normal bank would charge you. In the UK, it’s the Co-Operative Bank that does this, in France it’s Banque Populaire. The co-operative movement is quite frequently used by various unions and in France Banque Populaire offers special deals to public servants.The post office links are even more widespread and various special arrangements exist between considerable numbers of national post offices for their account holders. However, information on these isn’t widely distributed and it can take a little searching to find out about them. One advantage that almost all give you is that a post office account effectively gives you government issued proof of address once your first statement arrives.
