If you are lucky enough to:
1. find a DAME who has the delegation to issue your new certificate, and
2. not have given Avmed an excuse to meddle in your medical affairs,
getting a new medical certificate is usually relatively stress-free.
No. 2 is the killer.
Avmed are constantly inventing aero-medically relevant conditions and looking for any excuse to intervene and demand tests. It does not matter what the people with specialist qualifications and knowledge of individual applicants consider to be justified. It does not matter if finite and valuable medical expertise and equipment could be put to some beneficial use rather than reacting to Avmed overreach.
The solemn deliberations of Avmed’s ‘complex case management meetings’ determine what is justified. It’s like a bunch of private pilots who’ve spent some hours flying a 737 on their PC flight simulator getting together and deciding whether an ATPL with 2,000 hours of 737 command time made the right decisions in an emergency.
It is said that these complex case management meetings lead to better decision making. Who says that? Avmed does. And us guinea pigs can just STFU and wait until Avmed can manage to find the time and people to convene one of these meetings to determine how they think our lives should be run, and if the delay and uncertainty causes us any stress, stiff ****. If they’re flat out or short of people, that’s our problem. They are saving the world from us.
Although there is no recognised specialisation in ‘aviation medicine’ – just as there is no recognised specialisation in e.g. trout fishing medicine – the mystique of aviation has resulted in Avmed being placed in a position in which it is, as a matter of practicality, dictating the testing and medical management of people who want to hold a medical certificate. And the data collected – under duress cloaked as consent – is a rich source to be mined and discussed at solemn Avmed conferences.
This would all be unethical if Avmed owed any ethical duties to us guinea pigs, but that would get in the way of 'safety'. Look at CASA’s position on the subject of this thread. According to CASA, CASR 11.140 provides no protection from the capricious consequences of Avmed delays. If we were protected, that would undermine Avmed’s power over us.
(Had a very interesting discussion recently with a chap who underwent an ECG a while ago. Nurse asked whether the chap felt well. Nurse said he’d either recently had a heart attack or was about to have one. Chap said he felt fine. Nurse calls in the Doc, who also decided the chap’s a cardio-vascular time bomb, despite him feeling fine. Months and many thousands of dollars in tests later, they discover that the electrodes had been wrongly connected for the ECG. A bog-standard, garden variety case of medical negligence. Turns out the Doc is someone who’s now in CASA Avmed. One of the submissions to the Senate Committee inquiry into GA details test results which CASA Avmed misconstrued by a factor of 1,000. You’ll see, in the thread about the notorious CASA ‘Form 420’, that CASA Avmed decided to take a questionnaire - designed for use by experts in the diagnosis of ADHD in school children - and inflict it not only on adults, but adults with ASD. The FOI documents reveal the languid arrogance of the unqualified Avmed overreach that produces these kinds of outcomes, and that it was only public exposure that precipitated any action. The risk of every mistake and unqualified overreach lands in the lap of us guinea pigs. And it’s all too hard for CASA to provide access to documents showing the evidential basis upon which the OCVA was dumped and CASA Avmed invented the ACVA for colour vision deficient pilots. That’s because the decision was made on the basis of prejudice, not evidence.)
Avmed knows that its behaviour is driving potential medical problems ‘underground’. It’s on a ‘charm offensive’ to try and convince us that Avmed is all sweetness and light. Don’t fall for it. Judge them by what they do, not what they say.