Five Reasons Your Doctor May Not Be as Good as You Think

For most of the modern era, doctors have been held in very high esteem by patients and peers alike; and while they may or may not be as highly regarded as they once were, they are still considered to be people that are smart, dedicated and trustworthy by most people. Thus, it's difficult to think about the possibility that your doctor may not be as good as you think he or she is. But in some cases, it might be true. Below are five reasons why.

1 - No call backs: It used to be, way back in the days when doctors still made house-calls, your doctor would call you later to see how you were doing. This was considered not only polite, but something a professional type person did after performing a service, and especially one in a field of such importance. The net result of going back to see patients after some time has passed, or at least calling them to see how things are going after performing a procedure on them, or writing out a prescription was that doctors continually improved their skills and sometimes learned whole new ways of doing things. In short, they got better at what they did the longer they practices. Contrast that with the system currently in place where quite often when you get a surgical procedure done, you are allotted one follow up exam a week or so later, and then, you are dropped off a cliff, or at least off their radar. Consider for example all the knee surgeries that are taking place, or the hernia operations where they use a mesh, or the procedures to help fix an aching back. In a lot of cases, patients are brought back, at an additional charge, for check-up to see if things are okay, meaning, not infected. It's left to the patient to call back for additional appointments or complaints or in many cases, any other communication at all. Thus, unless the patient takes it upon him or herself to call the doctor to let them know if their knee is fixed, or their mesh has meshed right, or their back pain has been relieved, there is no feedback, which means in a likely majority of his or her cases, a doctor has no real way of knowing what they did actually worked, or if after review, if another approach might have been better; which means, there is very little learning going on. And that's one of the main reasons your doctor might not be quite as good as you are thinking, or maybe hoping.

2 - Too many patients: We all know that in the current system, the more patients a doctor sees in day, the more he or she gets paid. Thus, doctors, like anyone else, try to get in as many as possible. The result is patients not always getting the amount of attention needed to truly diagnose and treat a problem.

3 - Specialization: While of course there needs to be specializing in medicine, because it is far too large and complicated of a field for any one person to completely master everything, the more recent trend of increased specialization for profit rather than the good of the patient tends to lead to doctors being really good at just a few little things; and if you happen to have something that falls between these cracks of knowledge, you might find yourself wandering from doctor to doctor, like a lost lamb looking for its mother.

4 - Too little sleep: It's difficult to remember sometimes, that doctors are human too. They have to eat and sleep and they have moods and some of their days are better than others. When you consider that many doctors have more going on in their life than just you, you have to know that sometimes, if not quite often, they, like many other people running around today, don't always get enough sleep. And you know what that does to your acuity and ability to do the things you do.

5 - Just not as good as others: It's a sad thing, as you'd think that if someone made it all the way through medical school and then their internship and residency and all that other training they go through, that they ought to be just really darn good. Unfortunately, that's not always the case; and that's because some people are not as good as others. Some have natural talent and instincts and fly through their education. Others have to fight to pass every exam. The end result, as in other area of human endeavor, is that some doctors are better than others.

These five reasons your doctor may not be as good as you think, are not meant to demean the medical profession or to cause alarm; it is more of a wake-up call for people who aren't always paying attention to what is going on in the medical world.