How to Find the Best Doctors
A blog on how you can find the best doctor.
The first tip is to start with the right attitude. It’s surprising what you can achieve if you’re determined enough and stubborn in the face of adversity. Not everyone will understand your mission, but you’ll be amazed at how many people are willing to help if you just ask nicely. The most important thing is to take a deep breath, relax and avoid getting angry or frustrated when things goes wrong.
Most of us don’t know where to start when searching for a doctor. This can leave us feeling lost and confused, which isn’t good for our health! However, there’s no need to worry because there are plenty of ways that you can find out about doctors near where you live or work and what kind of services they offer.
For example: use Google maps or other online mapping tool like Open Street Maps (OSM). You could also visit local hospitals and ask them about their doctors; some may even have websites with information on their staff members. Alternatively, if all else fails – why not try asking friends?
You’ll find yourself overwhelmed by all the different options available when looking for a doctor! This can leave us feeling lost and confused, which isn’t
A reader from London writes:
“I have just come across your blog ‘How to Find the Best Doctors’ and found it very interesting. I am an NHS patient and would like to know if there are any ways for me to find out about the doctor that I am due to see at my GP practice. Can you tell me how much experience the doctor has? Is there a way for me to find out whether the doctor is considered to be a good doctor?”
First, let’s take a look at some of the most important factors in choosing a doctor.
1. What type of insurance do you have? This factor should be considered first when determining how much experience your doctor has. For example, if you have a PPO (Preferred Provider Organization) plan, then your doctor may be more experienced than someone who doesn’t have this type of plan.
2. Do you have an HMO (Health Maintenance Organization)? If so, then it is important that your doctor is affiliated with the HMO, as this will allow them to provide better care and services for you.
3. Do you want someone who specializes in a certain area? There are many different areas of medicine and there are doctors who specialize in each one of them. You may want
The consumer behavior is changing, and so is the way we look for doctors. What if there were a web tool that would allow you to see what other patients had to say about their doctor? What if it was possible to see, on a map, exactly where the best doctors are?
Thanks to Patient Opinion (www.patientopinion.org.uk), this is now possible in Great Britain. While they have yet to make their services available in the US, it is a great example of what is possible. As the Internet becomes more pervasive, and as patients become more aware of their rights, it will become increasingly important for physicians to take control of their online reputation.
This site is full of great suggestions on how doctors can do just that. Check out “How can we improve this site?” And some of these suggestions are extremely useful for anyone who wants to take control of his or her online reputation. For instance: “Get involved in the site.” Think about making yourself available for answering questions from visitors to your website; think about using Twitter as a tool for engaging with others; think about writing blog posts and then answering any and all questions (and criticism) posted in response to those blog posts; think about making yourself available for interviews with journalists who write
There are five basic steps:
1. Find out what the top hospitals and doctors in your area are for the condition you have.
2. Get a second opinion from one of those top doctors.
3. If you need surgery, find out who in your area does the most of it. (This is often not the same as
If you’re like most people, you don’t shop for doctors the way you shop for a new car. You probably don’t even know where to start. After all, how do you compare doctors? On price? Speed? Comfort? Special features?
Most people look for a doctor the way they look for a lawyer or a plumber – they ask their friends. They figure if their friends have found someone good, that’s good enough for them.
There are some problems with this approach. For example:
1) Your friends may be nice, but they’re not very bright.
2) You may not have any friends who have seen a doctor lately, or at least none who live nearby and have a condition similar to yours.
3) Your friends only know about doctors in your area, and there may be better ones elsewhere.
4) Your friends can only recommend the doctors they’ve seen personally, which means the best doctors in town might never get mentioned.
If your knee hurts, you go to a doctor. If your hip hurts, you go to a doctor. But if your back hurts, who do you see?
If you live in the US, the answer is likely to be a chiropractor. In fact, according to the most recent data available from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), about 18 million adults visit chiropractors each year.
Chiropractic care has been around for more than 120 years and is based on the idea that misaligned joints can cause all kinds of medical problems, including back pain. But despite its popularity, there’s no good evidence that chiropractic adjustments can help treat back pain. (In fact, some research shows it could even cause harm.)
So what’s going on? Why would patients keep seeking out chiropractors? One possible explanation is that they’ve got nothing else to try. “There are many people who have chronic low back pain who don’t seem to get better with anything,” says Dr. Daniel C. Cherkin, senior investigator at Group Health Research Institute in Seattle and a professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine. And if there’s one group of doctors that seems primed to take on these cases it’s
When I was a kid, my family spent a lot of time at the hospital. My dad was a doctor, and my mom was studying to be a nurse. It seemed normal to me to eat dinner in the doctors’ lounge and go on rounds with my dad. When I was fifteen, I decided I wanted to be a doctor like him.
I did well in school, but my guidance counselor told me that medical school would be too expensive for me. I didn’t believe her. But now that I’ve finished applying to medical school, I realize she was right. It’s very hard for an ordinary student from an ordinary background to get into medical school and become a doctor.
No one wants you to know this. There are lots of people—patients, doctors, medical schools—who benefit from more students becoming doctors. Many of them have vested interests in making it look easy for ordinary people to do what they couldn’t do: get into medical school and become doctors.
The result is that there’s a lot of advice out there that seems aimed at helping ordinary students get into medical school, but actually makes it harder. The first step toward getting in is knowing what you’re up against.
