I noticed that every time I’ve taken myself or my kids to a different dentist for anything more than the very basic treatment, they mention something negative about the work done by the previous dentist(s). It’s not necessarily overt, but they certainly let you know that they would have done it differently, and their reasoning.
I find medical doctors who practice completely the opposite. Even if it’s quite obvious that they believe a prior diagnosis or procedure was incorrect, I almost never hear anything that suggests the prior doctor did anything wrong.
Perhaps the difference between the two is that medicine is far more standardized than dentistry, and also due to the heavy consequences of a malpractice suit on the former.
Also, I contract with various types of actuaries for the work I do, and they will never say or suggest anything negative of a prior actuary. And then we have lawyers…
“Most protective” is probably cops and/or soldiers. When folks have the feeling–accurately or otherwise–that they’re under attack, they tend to band together.
Teachers are somewhere in the middle. I’m pretty willing to crtiicize individual teachers, but when folks start criticizing the profession as a whole, my back gets up. But yeah, tell me about your kid’s teacher who marked “3x5=15” wrong because she expected “5x3=15,” or about a teacher who makes fun of a studnet in front of the class, and you won’t find me defending them.
The dentist thing is interesting; I feel like I’ve heard that, too. And folks doing home repair almost universally condemn the work of the previous workers, although that might be specific to my house, which was apparently designed and repaired by a troop of drunken chimpanzees.
I am not a dentist or a doctor, but I once spent way more time with dentists (IT consulting) than I ever want to again.
In dentistry you can see the tangible work of the previous dentist. Except for surgery (especially plastic surgery) you cannot see this in medicine.
The dentist can see, this is a terrible crown/filling/implant/whatever. The doctor just sees how your body reacted to prior treatments. Difficult to know if the treatment was the best available or not months or years ago.
That said my doctor, whom I have been seeing for 20 years, was pretty visibly and vocally pissed at a specialist who had clearly misdiagnosed my issue, delaying proper treatment for six months.
Interesting, and I think my experience is limited to those within the same specialty area. Since my insurance allows me to go straight to a specialist, I never see a doc outside of the particular specialty for any issue.
University professors will spend their careers feuding with each other, often quite publicly, sometimes quite viciously. But if someone outside academia criticizes them, they will march together in lockstep.
It’s totally anecdotal, but in my experience it’s rare to hear IT people talking about how their predecessors did things right when replacing an old system, or giving an old one a fairly serious overhaul.
We moved from BC to Newfoundland and my wife had to see a dentist. He looked at her dental work and said “wow! I couldn’t do work like that if I tried!” When she returned to her dentist in BC, the dentist said, “can I take pictures of that work for my study group? We were shown examples of this in dental school so we could recognize it in elderly patients.”
Incompetent engineers go into management where they direct the competent engineers and take credit for their work. When I was doing Finite Element Analysis we would test new managers by switching the color format on the result, generally red meant high stress (bad) and blue meant low stress (good), but we would switch them and see what they had to say. A good manager would catch on and laugh, but a poor one would make up some BS to justify the result he was seeing.
This is probably not what you were looking for, but I have to point out that expert witnesses often do nothing BUT criticize the work of other expert witnesses. I’ve seen two forensic engineers give depositions in which they take completely opposite positions and spend hours explaining why the other guy got everything in his opinion completely wrong.
Expert #1: “The vehicle in this video is going 45 miles per hour.”
Expert #2: “I don’t know where Expert #1 got his education, but that vehicle is clearly going 55 miles per hour.”
Expert #1: “Expert #2 is clearly wrong. And his dog is ugly.”
From my sample of dentists over the years, I’m inclined to think that the field is one that allows individual dentists to show their colors as either positive or negative individuals.
One feature I like in a dentist is a positive attitude, and my current one has this in spades.
He constantly says things like “Whoever put that filling in did an amazing job, you sure got your years of service out of that one” or “These are amazing crowns, nice work. Keep flossing!”
In another lifetime, at my exit dental exam on the USS Nimitz, I remember the dentist admiring my orthodontal work and calling the other dentists over and saying “Wow, have you ever seen a more perfect upper arch?”
In direct contrast was an eye doctor who asked about my childhood eye surgeries and then went on to criticize the techniques used, saying things to the effect of “If I had done this, I would have done blah blah blah and your eyes would be straight”
What good is that? There is absolutely no good to come from him criticizing the work done by a childhood surgeon when it is not possible to change anything–all that might happen is making me feel frustrated or depressed that Mom chose the wrong surgeon (he was crowing about himself; he certainly wasn’t warning me not to take my children to the same doctor).
He may have thought he was telling me what a crappy surgeon I had had; in fact, he was telling me what a crappy individual he was. I never went back.
I agree about the code older than 6 months. It seems that my confidence in the quality of my own work follows some sort of exponential decay, with the greatest confidence in the days and weeks following writing it.
As someone who deals with the same shit, I frick’n love this! (I don’t think the engineers at my work would be brave enough to try something like this though)
Arenas where physicians have no compunction about criticizing each other include “expert” court testimony and hospital cancer conferences. During the latter, oncologists are continually sneering at workups by clinicians, pissing on radiologists and pathologists and bickering among themselves.
However, a doc who habitually bitched to patients about his colleagues’ supposedly screwed-up diagnoses and treatments would likely become a pariah in the medical community in short order.
I’ve spoken to a few lawyers over the years, and they all spoke very highly of other lawyers.
In a lawsuit shortly after my divorce was final, my ex’s lawyer was obviously incompetent, while my team of attorneys were the best (most expensive) in the area (I was awarded legal fees to be paid by my ex).
Every time I’d say anything to my lawyer about how embarrassing they must be to practice alongside such a boob, they’d go out of their way to tell me that the bar has high standards, every lawyer was well educated, etc.
Art restoration and conservation. I think in just about every article I’ve ever read about the latest cleaning or refurbishment of the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa or whatever, the current expert has done a metaphorical headsmack and badmouthed whoever last worked on the project, be it five, fifty or a hundred years ago.
As Kissinger said of faculty politics at Harvard, “The fighting is so fierce because the stakes are so small.”
Reasonable doubt for a reasonable price! Yes, having dueling experts in a big-ticket case, especially medical malpractice, products liability or accidental death, is not unusual.