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Originally Posted by fw102807
This is very scary to me because you never know until something happens if you have made a good choice or not. As long as you are healthy all you can judge about your doctor is if he is personable.
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Which I can only imagine is quite scary for the average lay person, since your statement is generally true. You can look up any licensure issues, but they are quite rare. You can look up malpractice actions, but many of the best physicians attract the most malpractice cases (they take on more difficult cases, their patients may have unreasonable expectations, lawyers like picking off an expert, etc.). You can see where they went to medical school, but won't know if they graduated 176th in a class of 154 at Harvard and took 6 years to do it. I will say this---beware the doc who went to Harvard Med and then did a residency at Podunk Community Hospital. Likewise, don't dismiss a doc who went to the East Las Vegas School of Medicine and Bartending, but did his residency at Mass. General. The good news is that physician skills and judgement tend to follow a bell shaped curve, so while you may not catch the top 10%, you are just as unlikely to get the bottom 10%.
My only advantage is that I can sniff out the clowns in about 90 seconds of conversation. I ran into one 2 years ago, who was spouting out the biggest crock of BS I had heard in years, and claimed he had learned this from Dr. "X". Unfortunately for him, Dr. "X" was one of the interns I had trained 30 years earlier, so I knew none of this garbage had come from him.
So while it seem like a bit of a crap shoot to find a good doctor, the odds are still in your favor.