One of the mantras I repeat to the residents: bad doctors think they know, good doctors look it up.
Yeah, I’d expect someone who does OB on a regular basis to know the recommended dates for the screens. But at the same time, a LOT of antepartum care is essentially automated now, especially at the sort of practice that has computer terminals in the exam room. So it’s conceivable that the doc just didn’t have that piece of info on the tip of her tongue and wanted to look it up to be 100% sure.
Some doctors are better than others at being able to keep doses, guidelines, and such in their heads. I am not one of those doctors. I treat hyperlipidemia every single day, and I still look up the guidelines all the time. (Not in front of the patient, of course.)
If you got a bad vibe otherwise, I’d look elsewhere, but this wouldn’t really concern me.
My concern was that, as far as I’m aware, this is a bog-standard, absolutely typical test. Last time I didn’t even need to ask for it, it was simply done as a matter of course. This time I’m living in a different area and I have a new doctor. He didn’t refer me for the test and he sent me in for the ultrasound too early for that component to be done which is why I had to go back for another referral and a follow-up ultrasound.
I’d rather have a doctor who fact checks than a doctor who doesn’t, for sure, but I was surprised that the doctor had to Google to get the name of the Triple Plus Test (that’s what she’s written down), which I assumed was a common and everyday procedure.
Looking at the pathology request form, she’s printed off a request for a pap smear, crossed out pap smear by hand and written in triple plus test. The detachable portion of the form (presumably used by the pathology department) still has pap smear under “Test requested”.
She doesn’t know how far along I am. She didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell her. It’s possible that my doctor made a note about how far along I thought I was when I saw him last, a month ago, but it was an estimated date at that point. She was definitely looking up the name of the test. I watched her refer to the webpage and then write it down.
Back when I was a med student, I did a rotation at a physician’s office then being run by a guy who’d completed an internship but no residency (this was a small town and they had trouble attracting MDs to practice there). He excused himself from a patient and went into his office to look up something in a textbook. I thought, whoa, he has to look up answers in a book? But this is something common in medicine - there’s a huge amount of ever-changing information and few mere mortals can memorize it all.
I have a good-sized pathology library I consult frequently. I often look up papers on PubMed (an online database of published research), but for quick answers Google often leads me to dependable information more quickly, including some of the same papers referenced in PubMed. The trick of course is to use reliable sources, which patients may have more difficulty in assessing.
What was she looking up? Google can be the first in a chain of events to find something? Am not a doctor, but a lawyer and on more than one occassion I have used google to commence searching for something which has culminated on Westlaw.
There was a case I needed to use recenlty, but the name and citation escaped me. It did have a rather colourful phrase; so googled that. Found case entered citation in Westlaw and viola!
She was looking up the name of the blood test for Down Syndrome, which is the Triple Plus Test.
I didn’t like her manner at all, so the Google thing was just icing on the cake. A doctor with an unpleasant manner who apparently doesn’t know the name of a basic, routine test off the top of her head? Not going back! But if she’d been more pleasant, I probably would have chalked it up to being human.
Meh, I wouldn’t worry about not remembering the name of the test. Especially if the practitioner is a generalist. Different tests tend to have many names over time and in different health systems. Over the years, the standard blood test for basic electrolytes, kidney function and glucose has been called a “Chem 7”, “Astra”, “BCmet” and a “SMAC” in different systems I’ve worked in.
And just checking my references, I see the standard Down’s screen being called the AFP test, the double plus test, the triple plus test, the biomark test, and the Bart’s test.
Yes. I went to a new eye doctor when my old one retired. He did the basic tests and, when I asked about a new problem, he left the room for a while. When he came back he handed me some printouts from a web page as a reference to that problem. It was an interesting lead to a site that I have since done some research about my issue but otherwise it was just a google search that anyone could have done. He didn’t even pick the correct problem from the site. This visit cost me $200. Of course I never went back.
I don’t see how this can’t be a form of malpractice. Of course online research, fact checking and memory jogging are all valid uses for google. When a doctor just types in your claimed symptoms and hands you the printout (as appeared to be the case here) he needs to find another line of work.
Did his actions or lack thereof do you actual physical harm? If not, it’s difficult to legitimately claim malpractice. If so, then there might be a legitimate case.
No, he did no harm, he only provided information that anyone could have found with no medical skill. Perhaps malpractice is the wrong word - let’s say false advertising. I thought, when I made an appointment with the optometrist , that he would know about eye problems. There is all kinds of information on the internet; some of it even wrong (gasp!) Perhaps, if I had felt generous, I might have assumed he had reviewed a number of sites and found this one to be exactly correct for my situation but the site wasn’t that good.
When I first got pregnant, I went to my GP initially. Who does deliver babies and handle pregnancies (I loved that GP, who moved away). He said “I can deliver your baby, but quite honestly, I only do about two a year, most women go to an OB.”
Its a standard test, but its a standard test that that particular GP would order only twice a year. And not all GPs deliver babies. Some barely deal with pregnant women other than the initial “yep, the stick is pink - do you want a referral to an OB or do you have one in mind” part.
Well, there are differences between optometrists (Doctor of Optometry, 4 year degree after college, no post-doctoral training required) scope of practice and those of an ophthalmologist (Doctor of Medicine, specializing in diseases of the eye, 4 years of medical school after college, followed by 1 year general internship and 3 years of opthalmology residency). Your optometrist may have been sloppy, or beyond his capacity.
Of course, opthalmologists can be unhelpful, too. :eek:
