Kind of a multi-part question filled with a little background info (rant).
Yesterday I went to the doctor for the first time in about 2 years and now that I have an EPO I have dozens of doctors to choose from in the area.
To be accurate I should say doctors as the first doctor I went to most certainly couldn’t have been legit. I’ll spare the details but suffice to say I felt I needed to go to a real doctor right afterwards. Or I think I did.
The second guy had more of a doctor’s vibe to him and did a much better job than the first. However, he did give me some vitamin supplement which looks straight out of a infomercial, and is not covered by any insurance, to “cleanse my stomach”. This guy is also a doctor of osteopathy (DO) instead of an MD.
So now the questions: Is the D.O. as good a doctor as an MD? Was the vitamin supplement just a little new-age placebo to fill his coffers a little higher? And finally, is there a good resource to find highly regarded doctors with a good track record that I can use so I can stop my bad run of doctors and hopefully get something cured for once in my life?
I don’t know, if you have insurance check with your insurance company. They will have a directory of doctors and insurance companies typically do not put up with crap. If you don’t have insurance and are paying out of pocket, ask around. My rule of thumb for picking doctors/dentists out of the blue are:
a) I like their name
b) Their ad/directory entry/etc. specifies that their office is English + set of languages. Now, I look at the set of languages and decide. Spanish is good, but I do not go to any that include any east or southeast asian, eastern european (especially Russian), or middle eastern languages (Hebrew/Yiddish excepted).
c) The office is in the nice part of town with expensive real estate
d) They do not advertise anything shady
e) They are accepted by at least one major insurance plan
Now, I realized before I get torn to shreds for b) point above, let me not that this is not racist, if anything it’s “culturist”. Doctors that advertise that they speak a language are trying to cater to that community, and typically (at least in my experience) adjust their habits, standard of care, etc. to match the expected behavior of doctors for the country of origin of that community. I’ve had Russian doctors in Russia, I’ve had Russian doctors in the US, no thanks.
The doctors I went to yesterday are in fact listed on the BlueCross Blue Shield website (which I have as my insurace).
In regards to “d)”, the first doctor I went to yesterday had advertisements all over the place for botox, laser skin treatments and a whole slew of other treatments that I have no idea how he could accomplish in his ratty hole-in-the-wall office.
e) the second doctor is supposedly accepted by multiple insurance plans.
Thanks for your input Groman, hopefully there will be more from some other SDopers.
Other people may be able to answer this better but DO’s are 100% legit medical school graduate doctors. Many act just like MD’s but their training is tracked a little differently to focus more on holistic approaches to medicine and some may prescribe things that are on the fringes of established medical practice.
I would assume that the biggest difference is the type of people the MD versus the DO training attracts but that is only a guess. There are many good DO’s out there.
The best way to find a good doctor is by word of mouth or using the brute force approach of interviewing or trying out different ones until you find a doctor you like. Insurance companies will just give you a list and there aren’t many “doctor ranking” sources for obvious reasons. Some states allow you to see the number of complaints and malpractice suits brought against individual doctors but who really knows how to interpret a typical number.
Alas, no. For legal reasons*, no one dares set up a site to rate or recommend doctors. The only advice is to ask around your workplace and your neighbors to find out who they might use.
*If you say anything bad, their lawyers will come a-knockin’.
This doctor didn’t tell you exactly what needs to be cleansed from your stomach, did he? If my doctor gave me anything to “cleanse” any part of my body, or used the word “toxins”, without having run extensive tests to determine that some sort of poisoning was actually the problem with me (and then, I’d want a second opinion if I wasn’t too sick to wait for one), I’d look for another doctor. Selling expensive and useless remedies for " detoxification" is a not-uncommon scam pulled by quacks.
Generally, a DO has training as good, and on occasion better, than an MD. I’ve chosen osteopathic physicians for myself and my family in the past, and I’m an MD. I’ve posted more on this topic in the past, so if you’re really interested, run a search on my name and the word “osteopath” and you’re bound to find something.
Otherwise, it’s tough to tell who’s really good, sometimes. Popular doctors in a community may be that way not because they practice good medicine, but because they give the patients what they want. Doctors who are listed in the data banks as having been sued a lot may be in that situation because they are better doctors who get the tougher cases, for which there are more bad outcomes, and hence lawsuits, often of the unjustified sort. The data bases list the fact of a lawsuit, not its merit.
You can ask if your physician is board-certified by his particular specialty board. Internal Medicine and Family Medicine specialties both have accrediting boards as does Pediatrics, which certify that the doctor in question not only completed a bona fide training program in that specialty, but was able to pass a pretty complex exam, or set of exams to demonstrate a certain level of knowledge. American Board of Medical Specialties
I’ve had some sort of skin rash on my face for about 2-3 years now that has never fully gone away. I diagnosed it as ringworm on WebMd and he agreed, giving me an anti-fungal pill to take everyday which is fine. However, he then claimed that fungus perpetuates itself in the gut and so that I should use this Ultra Flora to finally cleanse myself of it.
Somehow, I think the prescription will be doing all the work and the flora will only lighten my wallet. Any thoughts?