I honestly don’t know how you can be brilliant at being a doctor without listening to your patients. I’m not saying you need to tolerate them droning on and on, but the patient has to give you information, too. If they are patronizing and difficult to deal with, doctors can’t easily get this information or just don’t want to hear it. A doctor who won’t answer questions won’t give information that patients need to use to understand and fulfill directed treatments, either. How can such a doctor be skilled and brilliant? It’s a damn stupid way to behave even from a purely results-driven perspective.
My current doctor is not exactly the warm and compassionate type, but she is an excellent communicator. She answers questions and explores options. She asks pertinent questions and listens to the answers. She is not patronizing or impatient, though she does have a sense of urgency. That’s one of the many reasons she’s a good doctor, and one I got from several recommendations.
I have two excellent doctors, plus a nurse practitioner, who are all cutting-edge knowledgeable, and also treat their patients as human beings. But if I had to make that kind of choice, I’d say that I go to them for their skills and expertise. My health issues require someone who is more than “average.”
I want a cold, effective doctor even for relatively minor issues. I hate wasting time visiting doctors who obviously have no idea what could be affecting me and suggest that I’m just experiencing stress or that I’m exaggerating a very minor issue out of hypochondria. I’ve had a lot of this lately and it’s really annoying.
My primary-care doctor is warm and compassionate. That’s one of the reasons I like her. She can manage most of my problems.
On the other hand, I prefer my specialists to be brilliant, and I’m willing to tolerate a certain amount of assholishness if it means getting better care. I’d rather spend five minutes with the best surgeon who tells me I don’t need surgery than an hour making chitchat with some warm and fuzzy guy who doesn’t know a gall bladder from a spleen, but he’s willing to get rid of both to spare me the trouble.
Agreed. I think if a doctor is kind and compassionate enough, they’ll stick with you and your problem however long it takes to get it fixed. Or you to the right person that will.
After reading this thread, I’ve a question for KarlGauss and Qadgop and any other docs out there. It’s along the lines of what Beadalin and fluiddruid said - how the heck can you be a brilliant doc when you don’t take the time to listen to your patients, and (secondary, but also important) answer their questions and explain your findings to them?
I can deal with rude or condescending or a whole bunch of other personality flaws, but when I go into the doctor and he/she doesn’t take the time to listen to me, well, I’m out of there. How in the world can you tell what’s going on with me if I can’t take 5 minutes of your time and tell you why I’m in your office?
Conversely, if I have a question about treatment/diagnosis/whatever and you don’t answer it, how do you know that I’m following your directions correctly and fully understand what needs to be done to fix problem x?
I already had one bad session with an endocrinologist who didn’t shut up long enough to listen to me, and who got pissy with me when I had a question about a drug he wanted to put me on. As it turned out, he had totally diagnosed me incorrectly, and I think in no small part because he didn’t listen to what I was saying (or look at the very carefully collected records I brought in). Now, if a doc is too busy to listen, I’m finding another doc. I don’t care how brilliant they are - if they don’t take time to get the data, how in the world can they give the right diagnosis/treatment plan/whatever?
I’d start to answer by saying it’s much easier for a surgeon to be cold, ‘unlistening’, etc., than it is for a doc who doesn’t deal with surgical issues. Clearly, the former could be a brilliant technician but a real asshole in terms of interacting with conscious humans.
Still, but admittedly to a lesser extent, you could also be like that in the ‘medical’ specialties. For example, much of cardiology is independent of anything the patient says. Instead, “objective” information such as angiograms, electrophysioloigcal tracings, etc., can guide both the diagnostic and therapeutic approach. So, you can be a brilliant cardiologist, supposedly able to place stents in blocked arteries that others wouldn’t touch, or be renowned for your ostensible ability to burn away just the right heart cells that were causing dangerous heart rhythms, and still be a prick.
Along those lines, I don’t think I’d be too far off base to say that a doc with absolutely no people skills could still be considered brilliant in any area where lab results or imaging results (CTs, MRIs, etc.) drive the diagnoses and treatments. In fact, much of cancer medicine could be like that - with x-rays, novel tests, and cutting edge research knowledge as the key guides and interventions respectively. But that’s also a great example of a field where people would usually be much better off with the compassionate type of physician who isn’t a genius. It seems almost self-evident (to me at least) that for ongoing cancer care you’d want someone you’re not afraid of.
Heh. I know how that feels. I went to Hopkins and wanted to be a generalist. Many of my classmates are now double-boarded department chairs, presidents of biotech corporations they founded, or head huge research institutions. I do primary care in a prison!
It’s really okay, though. A competent generalist with correct amounts of empathy and compassion is worth their weight in gold. It is scary to me how many docs out there really are not competent.
[sub]And a lot of my quirkier classmates have really gone off the rails over the years. Though the same could have been said about me at one time[/sub]
I voted #1, for many of the reasons stated above. The “average” doctor is almost always going to be able to handle the situation just fine, and his caring attitude is going to be reflected in the rest of the team. If it isn’t quite so clear, I think #1 is likely to put more energy into making the diagnosis and implementing the treatment plan than #2, and that probably makes up for the differential in “Brilliance”.
Here’s the big kicker, for me: when Doc #1 reaches the limits of his competence he’ll call Doc #2 and ask for some help. If Doc #2 reaches his limits–say, he doesn’t care enough to spend the time to make an accurate diagnosis–he’s not going to call #1.
Are you? In most cases in the US these days, the insurance company is paying them, and the insurance company is deciding which physicians are or are not in their network.
I need an expert orthopedist to deal with certain aspects of a condition I’ve got. It’s very rare and there’s not many I would trust to actually operate on me because of that, they could accidentally do something very wrong and not realize it. This is because even if they don’t realize it working on me could well get them in over their heads.
So give me the expert surgeon, even if his bedside manner kinda sucks. (The ones I know of aren’t all jerks, actually, but even if one was, so be it.)
For everyday care stuff, I want somebody more like doc A. No question.
I voted “kind and compassionate” because I’ve dealt with arrogant doctors and I remember them with hatred and betrayal to this day. Never a life or death situation (except when I was in labor with my son and the baby was in distress). Then again, the OB mentioned was NOT “brilliant” and need to be beaten soundly. ditto the anesthesiologist.
If a doctor is condescending / cold / nasty, I simply cannot bring myself to trust anything they say.
