Introduction

Reviews

Telling Good Doctors from Bad Doctors

Timothy B. McCall, M.D.

Why do smart people have such a hard time telling a good doctor from a bad one? Perhaps many are fooled by good bedside manner. They figure a doctor who listens to them and who seems compassionate, must be competent. As important as these qualities are, they don’t make an otherwise incompetent physician good. In fact, some of the most dangerous doctors I’ve seen in my career were nice people.

Many factors affect a doctor’s competence. A doctor may never have received adequate training and simply lack the requisite knowledge. Some doctors who start out knowledgeable fail to keep up-to-date and as the time from the completion of their training increases, they become less and less competent. Other doctors become debilitated by illness or senility which they may not recognize or admit.

Many people assume that if a physician is licensed, he or she must be competent. State licensing boards, however, have proved ineffective in rooting out bad doctors. Consumers can’t count on insurance companies either, because doctors guilty of repeated malpractice usually have no difficulty obtaining malpractice insurance. Large malpractice settlements are almost always shrouded by secrecy agreements that prevent any details from becoming public. Doctors with multiple malpractice settlements often go on practicing with none of their current and prospective patients aware of their records.

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