<p>I would also like to know how anyone could be “forced” to have an unnecessary C-section or an induction.</p>
<p>The qualities I look for in a doctor depend a lot on what their specialty is. For any doctor, I need them to actually listen to me because I have a long and somewhat convoluted medical history. It’s not always clear if something that’s wrong is a symptom of a condition or is a separate problem.</p>
<p>For a primary physician, I want one that has a good personality, plenty of office hours, and an outstanding front office staff. I want one that will return a call within 24 hours, and who will call me to discuss test results (not make me come in for another visit if everything is fine).</p>
<p>For specialists, I look for doctors who are heads of their departments in teaching hospitals - they usually know the latest medical developments. </p>
<p>For orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons, I want them to have successfully done my exact surgery about a million times. I want them to have written papers and done research and maybe even invented a new/better procedure.</p>
<p>Axw, the heads of the departments at teaching facilities are usually the top researchers and usually not the best practitioners. </p>
<p>I was a resident at a very prestigious research institution that produced a good number of department heads around the country. I would choose less than a third, if that, of these providers for my own care. Also, choose less than 10% of the department heads. After I entered private practice, I was blown away at how great the private DO and MD practitioners were from bottom schools. I would go to the people you described only if I had some weird rare disease and that doctor was one of the few in the world who developed the expertise to treat it.</p>
<p>I have had three friends lately whose doctors attempted to bully them into scheduling c sections the mothers did not feel were necessary. Were they necessary? I don’t know. The babies were born naturally and healthy but maybe they were lucky. It’s hard to know what’s really going on, but the mothers did feel bullied. Of the six babies I know born most recently, I think all were either induced or born by c section, and only in one case was there any obvious danger to those of us without a medical license. But again, who can really say?</p>
<p>What I would be looking for on a ratemydoctor website would be a doctor where you don’t wait two hours to see a doctor who half listens to your symptoms for two minutes before shoving you out the door with the closest fitting catch-all diagnosis they can come up with off the top of their head. I have been severely ill for going on seven years of my life and have gotten nothing from a dozen doctors but “we’ll that’s interesting… It could be <em>this,</em> but to be honest with you it probably isn’t.” Then they try the treatment for whatever their theory was, it doesn’t work, and we all throw up our hands. I’ve given up.</p>
<p>I could definitely believe a woman could be pressured into having a C-section. But I was referring to the word “forced.” </p>
<p>I did have 2 C-sections. My babies were almost 10 lbs. each (I did not have gestational diabetes). I never dilated over 3 centimeters. No way were those babies coming out of my body without help. I was disappointed the first time and tried to do VBAC for the second one, but it wasn’t in the cards for me.</p>
<p>@frugaldoctor, thank you for that interesting information. I have conditions that are not clearly defined. There’s something new on the horizon every 15 minutes, it seems, but nothing that helps me - yet. So I hope that my doctors will be among the first to know if there’s really something out there for me. Emaheevul07’s experience sound eerily similar to mine.</p>
<p>ETA: I actually have two doctors with the same specialty, and they have very different opinions about what’s going on with me. It’s very interesting, and I keep both of them in hopes that eventually one will “figure it out”.</p>
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<p>Physicians practicing in the US have to pass through some extremely selective education gates to get to practice: medical school admission (all medical schools in the US are elite for admissions), medical school itself (while it is rare to flunk out, the fact that it is four more years of school deters the less committed from applying in the first place), residency, board certification (not required but often looked for). That is likely the reason for the finding in the article.</p>
<p>The quality range (to the extent that school education influences it) in engineering is relatively narrow due to ABET accreditation minimum standards; in situations where a PE license is needed, the PE licensing requirements further narrow the quality range (raising the minimum standards). Perhaps it not as narrow as medicine in the US (the selection gates are not quite as elite as for physicians), but still enough to mean that you are unlikely to find bad engineers who graduated from any engineering school.</p>
<p>Now, computer science is much more chaotic, as there can be large quality variations between different schools. ABET accreditation exists, but many of the better schools choose not to seek it, although there are some very poor ones without. But the fact that computer science is relatively easier to self-educate (compared to medicine or engineering) means that there are many people who get good at it through self-education, even though they may have no degree or a degree in an unrelated subject not necessarily from a “good” university.</p>
<p>Axw, I feel for you. When you have an ill defined condition, it can be very difficult to be appropriately diagnosed. Use the internet, talk to others, and do a lot of research (pubmed.com). Hopefully you won’t have to suffer too long before you find your diagnosis and cure.</p>
<p>Thank you, frugal doctor. This has been ongoing for over 25 years, but I remain hopeful. :)</p>
<p>I won’t go to a doctor who is not board certified. My H is part of a large multi-specialty group, they would not hire any doctor who is not board certified, or if they are board eligible, they need to be certified within a year.</p>
<p>My H is in a specialty that needs to be re-certified every 7 years and he’s taken the boards 5 times already.You don’t want to see a doctor who is not current in his/her medical knowledge.</p>
<p>Most patients don’t care what school you went to as long as you’re certified</p>
<p>I interviewed a couple of OBs when pregnant and chose a nurse midwife, hospital delivery. Older S had an issue early in pregnancy so I had to switch (and wound up being induced), with D I was able to do it on my schedule. Experience with D’s birth was vastly superior.</p>
<p>riprorin- I think Google determined grades you obtained or where you attended were not a solid indicator if you would be a good employee</p>
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If you had any unforeseen complications, you would wish you had a doctor and a hospital to handle it.</p>
<p>The lovely thing about using a nurse midwife is that there is in fact a doctor and hospital to handle it if needed. As I said, hospital delivery.</p>
<p>I had a nurse midwife in a hospital and thought it was great. In fact one of the OBGYN’s from the practice came to observe, because he thought he had a lot to learn from her. I know some C-sections are necessary, but rates in this country are completely out of whack. </p>
<p>We go to the gym with a guy who went to med school in the Caribbean. We’ve learned a lot from him about how it works. One thing he said which you may find reassuring is that while it’s easier to get in, they have no compunction about flunking you out. They basically weed out anyone they don’t think is good enough. It’s a slightly different system. He was doing clinical rotations here in US hospital and just got into a residency program in a different city so we won’t be seeing him.</p>
<p>I’ll never the forget the OB-GYN coming in the day after my C-section (necessary after 22 hrs of labor, almost 12 lb. baby) and cracking that I had avoided an episiotomy. With S2, I found a GP who delivered babies because I wanted a VBAC. Labor was only 5 hrs, and I had 10 lb+ baby naturally. </p>
<p>I saw a PA for 15 years and was very happy with the care I received. She listened and explained things, and I had numerous problems over the years. She was also the instructor for PAs in the local medical school. She has moved away and recommended a DO who is also an instructor. I like him almost as much.</p>
<p>I also see a PA at my dermatologist’s office. I only see the doctor himself if it’s something unusual or particularly delicate.</p>
<p>If I had to see a specialist, I would first look to them for referrals, and not necessarily the local specialist available. H travels 60-70 miles to see his opthamologist because the local guy is a surgery pushing, bullying doctor with a 2-3 hr wait for no obvious reason.</p>
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<p>As someone else (I think Pizzagirl) mentioned, “board eligible” means that you have graduated from an accredited residency program and are therefore eligible to sit for the board exams in that specialty.</p>
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<p>You can’t become board certified in any specialty after only one year of residency training, but you can receive a full (unrestricted) medical license from most states, which is all that is required to practice medicine independently. That being said, most hospitals won’t give you privileges at their facility if you aren’t BE/BC.</p>
<p>There are also subspecialty board certifications. For example, in pediatrics you first are certified in general pediatrics, and then with sufficient training and examinations you can get sub-board certified in cardiology, endocrinology…etc. etc. </p>
<p>People who go through the process of getting and maintaining certification do ongoing continuing education, practice quality improvement etc. It is hardly incidental in terms of the knowledge base of the physician or the commitment they are making to themselves and their patients. If you go to someone who either can’t be certified or isn’t bothering to do so, you are seeing someone who has not made that commitment. </p>
<p>I have patients who see other specialists who are using controversial therapies for some areas. When I research these specialists I often find that their certification is NOT in the area where they are doing controversial work. Lots of the people who do biomedical treatment for autism are not pediatricians, psychiatrists, developmental pediatricians… for example. </p>
<p>Of course it matters, it all matters. You may not care if the person doing your neuro-surgery is board certified or not. I can assure you that most mainstream doctors do. Furthermore, they care where someone was trained, not entirely because of prestige, but because of training practices and approaches which vary from program to program.</p>
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<p>Hi Icarus, Are you saying that there are some practicing Doctors in the US who have not graduated from an accredited residency program and therefore can never be board eligible? </p>
<p>My question was based on the assumption that all practicing Doctors in the US have graduated from an accredited residency program, making them all board eligible. But some choose not to take boards or fail boards. Are those doctors still considered board eligible? Do they lose their board eligible status after a certain time period?</p>