60 Additional Reasons for Finding Another Doctor
INTRODUCTION
In 2014 I wrote the article “5 Good Reasons for Finding Another Doctor.” The reasons I listed were things that doctors do wrong which you should not tolerate. In this article, I wanted to provide more examples of professional misbehavior
Of course, you may have to change doctors for other reasons. In fact, being forced to change doctors these days has become an inescapable necessity, sometimes for reasons that can’t be blamed either on the doctor or the patient. Below are some of the most likely scenarios and/or cogent reasons for making a change.
WHY YOU MAY NEED TO FIND ANOTHER PHYSICIAN
Incompetence
1. Your doctor has shown serious signs of incompetence, negligence or malfeasance.
2. Your doctor isn’t resolving your most pressing medical issues very effectively, if at all.
3. Your doctor keeps making mistakes that you picked up on; what about the mistakes you’re not aware of?
4. Your doctor appears to be making you (or letting you get) sicker with his treatment regimen and medical approach.
5. Your physician shows signs of dementia, senility or Alzheimer’s. This is sometimes the case, unfortunately, for some physicians that keep working beyond the typical retirement age.
6. Your doctor keeps making mistakes that are simply unforgivable—like prescribing antibiotics or other meds to which you have been officially found to be “allergic.” Such mistakes kill thousands of people each year.
7. Your doctor displays signs of drug abuse, alcoholism or a mental health condition.
8. Your doctor is very nice but not very good at his chosen profession, maybe because he isn’t proactive enough, in your opinion.
Lack of Professionalism
9. Your doctor is consistently patronizing, belittling and disrespectful.
10. Your doctor continuously delegates your care to his/her PA or NP without your input or permission and then has the gall to charge the visit as if you were seen by him/her.
11. Your doctor engages repeatedly in illegal, unethical or immoral behavior, including overcharging or mischarging for services rendered, defrauding the insurance companies or patients—e.g., putting on the bill that you saw him/her even though in reality you saw his/her PA or NP on the last visit. Insurance companies pay higher prices if you see a doctor, as opposed to seeing an NP or PA.
12. Your doctor doesn’t stay in touch with or cooperate very well with other doctors managing your health; in other words, she doesn’t seem to be a very good team player.
13. Your doctor doesn’t keep up with new technology. Incredibly, we require teachers to undergo continuing education but, when it comes to doctors, we seem to have a much more forgiving and tolerant attitude.
14. Your doctor is uncomfortable at the fact that you are much better informed/educated than the average patient; this can be especially awkward and unacceptable if you are a fellow healthcare provider.
15. You see the PA, NP or covering physicians more than you see your own doctor.
Too Busy
16. Your doctor seems too busy to give you the personal care you want or need.
17. Your doctor makes you feel too much like just another “number” on his long list of nameless patients.
18. Your doctor is obsessed with running a profitable “assembly line” operation, putting the “process” ahead of important doctor/patient relationships.
Low Standards/Quality
19. Your doctor seems to be too unwilling to order any tests or perform any procedures that may require too much paperwork.
20. Your doctor doesn’t seem to be “high quality”-oriented; he seems to tolerate or encourage a “low standards” attitude.
21. Your doctor seems to dish out diagnoses and popular treatment plans without thorough evaluations (detailed examination, blood work & medical imaging, if necessary). This may save time but it’s not good medicine.
22. Your concerns, worries and questions about things prescribed to you aren’t being properly addressed; he may be the doctor, but you will be the one dying a premature death if things don’t work out too well.
Arrogant Closedmindedness
23. Your doctor gets upset when you ask questions about alternative treatment options or procedures you’ve read about or are familiar with.
24. Your doctor vehemently opposes viable treatment plans or specific medications available for your condition simply because he/she isn’t too familiar with the treatment option.
25. Your doctor has a problem with you getting second opinions.
26. Your doctor is dangerously closed-minded, opinionated & and unwilling to ever admit that he/she may sometimes be wrong. If he, for example, has diagnosed a problem that isn’t getting any better (maybe because his treatment plan is deficient or not aggressive enough) and, more importantly, if the symptoms and medical findings don’t appear to support his arbitrary diagnosis, then you should definitely be concerned, to the point perhaps of finding a better doctor.
27. Your doctor seems to frown on new procedures, medicines or treatment options, doesn’t want to even consider them, or becomes overly patronizing if you even ask about the option.
Lack of Confidence or Trust
28. Your doctor gets upset if you express serious concerns about her proposed treatment plan for any medical problem.
29. Your doctor and you don’t have a healthy, cooperative and complementary relationship. It doesn’t really matter who’s at fault. How well you get along with your doctor is crucially important.
30. Your doctor doesn’t keep you fully informed of medical situations; perhaps because he believes that you are unable to handle the information, he keeps too many secrets from you.
31. Your doctor just freaks you out, makes you feel uncomfortable or doesn’t inspire trust and confidence in his skills and professional wisdom.
32. You no longer (or maybe you never did) have complete confidence in your doctor’s abilities, personal concern for your health, or capacity to do what’s in your best interest.
33. Your doctor has multiple complaints against him or her, has been disciplined more than once by the licensing board, or, worse yet, has ever lost a license to practice medicine in any state, has been sued more than once for malpractice, or has been convicted in criminal court for any offense, including health insurance fraud.
Poor Communication
34. Your doctor isn’t a very good listener.
35. Your doctor’s communication skills are lacking, to the point of making it difficult to get points across effectively, or, what’s worse, understanding what he means.
Unreasonable Expectations
36. Your doctor imposes expectations and demands on patients she doesn’t apply to herself. If she is often late for appointments, for example, she has no right to penalize you in any way if/when you show up late for such. Your doctor should show you the same respect she expects from you.
37. Your doctor doesn’t want you to be an active, well-informed participant in your care; in other words, his approach is more of a dictatorship than a cooperative, respectful partnership.
Staff Problems
38. Your doctor’s support staff is overtly rude, unprofessional, incompetent, negligent, inefficient and rather unsympathetic.
39. Your doctor’s medical support staff doesn’t follow proper rules of hygiene, skips important things, violates basic patient health assessment procedures, or fails to do their job very well.
Office Deficiencies
40. Your doctor’s practice is technologically challenged. Maybe they are still using an old computer system or software, refusing to convert all records into EMRs, still writing (rather than calling in or Faxing) prescriptions, etc.
41. Your doctor’s waiting room is a painful-to-look-at, not-keeping-up-with-the-times, poorly-maintained and uninviting potential health hazard. All these can be “symptoms” of a poorly-managed enterprise.
42. Your doctor is behind the times in terms offering amenities the better-equipped doctors today routinely offer. These include: free Wi-Fi; extended office hours, including (even if intermittently) weekends; online medical electronic records accessibility; the ability to make online appointments; being able to email the doctor or his staff; being able to accept the most popular or most readily available health plans; etc.
Poor Leadership
43. Your doctor keeps very shoddy, hard-to-access or unintelligible medical records; this is especially troublesome if he/she is still using written records rather than electronic ones.
44. Your doctor’s operation is badly organized or coordinated. Some of the tell-tale signs include: lost or difficult to access test results; your insurance company isn’t properly (and in a timely fashion) billed; making an appointment is tricky, difficult or unreliable; you usually have to wait for unusually long periods of time during each visit; it’s difficult to get a prescription refilled; etc.
Myopic Medical Care
45. Your doctor isn’t too much into preventive medicine, preferring, instead, to treat problems as they come along—in other words, sticking to the well-established “Putting out the Fires” or “POTFires” medicine tradition.
46. Your doctor doesn’t seem as concerned with proper nutrition as she should be and, in spite of the massive amount of science that says otherwise, doesn’t believe that proper nutrition can prevent or cure many diseases, including cancer, which some experts consider to be a nutritional-deficiency-prompted (if not exacerbated) disease.
47. Your doctor doesn’t take proper precautions in limiting to the minimum exposure to ionizing radiation from medical imaging tests.
48. Your doctor doesn’t want to seriously consider the fact that chemical pollution in our food, water and air is literally slowly poisoning all of us, to the point of our being able to say that both our global chronic disease and autoimmune pandemics are due to all the chemicals we are daily exposed to at work, at home, and in our daily activities. If nothing else, this should compel him/her to expose you to fewer chemicals, not more.
Miscellaneous Problems & Deficiencies
49. Your doctor persistently downplays the potential complications and side-effects of proposed medications and treatment plans or, what’s worse, doesn’t bother to mention them.
50. Your doctor and his staff seem too eager to be professional multi-taskers. While working on you, they text other people, work on email, write reports not connected to your visit, write out reports & prescriptions for other patients, etc. Multitasking increases chances for errors and generally reduces efficiency and effectiveness—more importantly, it can make you feel unimportant.
51. Your doctor or his staff violate your most basic rights to privacy and discretion; violating your privacy is illegal under HIPAA and other federal and local laws.
52. Your doctor doesn’t have connections or visiting privileges at a hospital near you. This can make it more difficult for him to play a significant role at any such facility, should you ever get seriously ill.
53. Your doctor isn’t board certified in his/her specialty.
54. Your doctor is too full of himself, focusing on his own accomplishment or interests, rather than focusing on you exclusively during your office visits.
55. Your doctor seems to be more concerned with complying with health insurance company demands than doing what is medically most expedient, efficient and efficacious.
56. You no longer live within a convenient distance to your present doctor.
57. Your doctor no longer accepts your health insurance plan or company.
58. Your doctor will no longer be able to keep you as a patient (having lost his/her license to practice medicine, no longer being able to afford liability insurance, having had retire, passing away, etc.).
59. Your doctor has reason to believe that you may sue him; this may prompt him to get rid of you, whether you want to make a change or not. It may also lead to your being put on special "difficult patients" blacklists the AMA says (though thousands of patients who’ve been put in this position tell us otherwise) don’t exist but which will make it harder for you to find another doctor.
60. Your doctor may not want to treat YOU anymore, maybe because your needs have become too complicated or demanding for his practice or because of more sinister reasons.
CONCLUSION
Having to change doctors isn’t necessarily a bad thing—in fact, it’s a very common thing these days. If you have a doctor you’ve been with for years that seems to take good care of you, then, by all means, keep that relationship going, if at all possible.
Don’t be afraid, though, to make a change--if it’s in your best interest do so or if circumstances beyond your control force the issue.
Copyright, 2018. Fred Fletcher. All rights reserved.
References & Resources
https://www.wellness.com/blog/13265781/5-good-reasons-for-finding-another-doctor/fred-fletcher
http://patients.about.com/od/therightdoctorforyou/a/whychangedoctor.htm
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2011/10/10-reasons-change-doctors.html
http://health.usnews.com/top-doctors/articles/2011/07/26/9-signs-you-should-fire-your-doctor
http://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2011/12/08/10-signs-it-may-be-time-to-fire-your-doctor/
