How Do You Know If Your Doctor Is Any Good?

A discussion of the characteristics that patients can use to differentiate good doctors from...not so good ones.

To address a couple of questions that might come up after watching this:

1. Probably the greatest and most reliable way to know if your doctor is good is if he/she is someone to whom other doctors and health care professionals refer their own family members. I don't mention that in the video because most people don't have a close personal contact in a health profession from whom they can ask this advice.

2. Regarding my assertion that the prestige of med school and training program is not predictive of the quality of *routine* care of patients, that's largely based on my personal experience (and the experience of family members and friends who have told me about their experiences with various doctors of different training pedigrees). I should have pointed out in the video that there *may* be a threshold effect whereby it doesn't matter until one reaches the schools that are particularly poorly regarded. For better or worse, I rarely interact with docs from these schools in my clinical practice, and to the best of my knowledge, there is no data that looks at such a question.

3. I don't mention whether the physician is affiliated with a major academic center, but this is similar as the prestige of a physician's training. It doesn't matter for routine care, but if a patient's condition was either unusually mysterious, or unusually complex, it's best to see doctors at a university-affiliated academic medical center.

4. In retrospect, I realize that I didn't discuss MD vs. DO. But if I had, it would only be to say that it doesn't matter, as long as the DO doesn't practice osteopathic manipulation (a.k.a. OMT). Although DO schools teach OMT, many practicing DOs recognize it as pseudoscientific nonsense.

Видео How Do You Know If Your Doctor Is Any Good? канала Strong Medicine