Switching Doctors

Posted on February 8, 2009
Filed Under Science | 1 Comment

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Over at Slate there was an interesting post on switching doctors. It’s worth reading. I think far too many people either out of inertia or some other irrational reason don’t shop around for doctors. I remain convinced that one of the best things you can do is get a second opinion – especially if it comes from a specialist.My own story comes from a rather highly recommended pediatrician. Yet his partners clearly weren’t as on top. Our child had constant health problems and ear aches. We kept getting prescribed anti-biotics and eventually it became clear they thought we were just hypochondriacs or overly protective parents. We took our son to a throat and nose specialist. He had acute tonsillitis and a terrible milk allergy. (And we’d been giving him lots of milk) He had surgery a month later.

There was realistically no reason the doctors should have missed that. And the specialist was pretty aghast that they had. Now the original doctors weren’t necessarily bad doctors. But I suspect they’d gotten into a rut. They’d ceased to be sufficiently critical.

We felt horrible and felt like we should have switched long before. And realistically we should have. Now we’re much more careful.

The problem is that there are so many clueless parents out there. And while the internet can be a huge boon to patients I’m sure it adds to the frustration level of doctors. (People looking up symptoms and demanding drugs for some disease they almost certainly don’t have) That said while I’m very sympathetic to doctors I think viewing the relationship as semi-adversarial one is wise. That is you ought look at doctors the way an employer would view a good worker who if not carefully managed does bad work or goofs off.

Doctors simply are not people to have faith in. Despite being in a field tied to science most doctors don’t have what I’d consider real scientific training problem solving. They are closer to mechanics than scientists. Further many doctors once they are practicing tend to have a very small range of problems that represent the vast, vast majority of cases they see. Add in clueless lying patients and they are very apt to miss real problems that are before them.

(As a side example a friend just had their 2 year old daughter rushed to emergency care by ambulance because she had acute diabetes. Once again something the doctors should have caught given her illnesses and the number of times she’d seen doctors. But for whatever reason they didn’t.)

The biggest danger in all this is that doctors lash out at patients who are unable to explain themselves well. This is probably the #1 reason why people turn to pseudo-science and quackery. I’d just urge people to look at second opinions and looking into specialists before you go the alternative medicine route.

Related posts:

  1. Vaccine Doctor Dismissal
  2. Religion and Brain Death
  3. Kissing Cousins
  4. Every Man a Derrida
  5. Gadamer and Authority
  6. Epistemology of Authority

Comments

One Response to “Switching Doctors”

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Any one doctor does not know anything. Such is impossible. It even takes House forty minutes and many wrong turns!

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