How to know if a doctor is a good one or notHow do people shop for their doctors?

As a doctor, this is one of the questions I hear being asked often. In most cases, I hear clear cut responses such he is a great doctor and others saying so and so isn’t a good doctor. This leaves me wondering what people base such definite responses upon whether it is subjective opinions or actual facts. While there is no doubt that people are now able to access facts about physicians more than in the past, most people tend to use subjective opinions mainly rather than research or actual facts. An average person spends days or hours shopping for a household appliance or an automobile. Despite the fact that people say that their most valuable asset is their health, the average person rarely spends much time shopping or researching for a doctor. The truth is that compared to the amount of time they spend on shopping for tech appliances, people rarely invest their time to hunt for a good doctor.

This is largely explained by the fact that trusted, valuable, accurate and good info on doctors isn’t easy to find and even though there is an improvement, it isn’t here yet. Subjective opinions that people use to conclude whether the doctor is bad or good is based on the aspects of a doctor overall care which the average person can easily see. Such include visible things like the communication skills, bed side manners and helpfulness. People also have some other subjective opinions such as assuming that a post surgical scar that looks great might have been performed obviously by a good surgeon. While these subjective opinions of people are very important, the truth is that objective facts have a greater value that can’t be ignored in determining the clinical competence of a physician.

The best way to answer this question

The best indicators of the clinical competence of a physician are objective facts. Some information specific to a physician that is available nowadays, although factual and objective doesn’t always correlate well with the competency of a physician. Consider for example the number of times that a doctor has been sued. According to most past studies, doctors with great competence buy whose bedside manners are lousy end up being sued more than patients compared to others who are deemed to be less competent. To get the best answer to this condition, you need to gather a lot of info about the doctor, possibly on the internet. Make a point of asking family members and friends about their subjective opinions regarding a particular doctor. In addition, ask a nurse what he or she thinks about the competence of a certain doctor and find out what other patients think of the doctor. With such info, you should be able to evaluate the competence of the doctor in question.