How to Know If Your Doctor Is a Great Doctor

Image via Wikipedia

I can talk all day long about bad doctors, just see yesterday's post. I have frankly had more experience with that kind of doctor than the good kind.

I do know that excellent doctors are out there, however. I will give you my personal check list that I have to have in my doctors. If he or she doesn't have these qualities, I move on until I find a better doctor.

I base these traits on three fabulous doctors that I have the pleasure and good fortune and thankfully now good health -- thanks to them -- to work with. One is a female ENT (Ear, Nose, Throat), one is a hormone specialist (he was the first doctor to believe that I had a thyroid problem and he fixed it) and one is a thyroid surgeon (often called one of the best thyroid surgeons in the country). I can easily add a fourth excellent doctor and that would be the TV doctor named Dr. Oz. I love that he cares about people with every fiber of his being. Had he not become a heart surgeon, he would have made a great shrink.

Traits of Excellent Doctors:

• They are rarely late for your appointment and if they are, they quickly apologize for keeping you waiting. They bother to put magazines in the waiting room in case they do run late. Simply putting up medical graphics or drug company promotions on the wall does not count as reading material. If you see an abundance of Big Pharma advertising, leave.

• They do not require you to wear that silly paper gown unless they have to examine something under that gown.

• They do not repeatedly interrupt you.

• They do not wear ties and often they leave that white doctor's coat at home as well. Bad germs love ties and that white coat often puts a lot of distance between doctor and patient.

• They are not offended if your bring in internet research that you want to discuss with them. This kind of doctor is thrilled to have a patient who is knowledgeable about their own health and one that will be an active partner in their own health care. They often recommend books for you to read to further your knowledge. This kind of doctor is never threatened by an informed patient.

• They don't stop learning the day they receive their diploma from medical school.

• Many of them don't mess with insurance because they refuse to allow an insurance suit to tell them how to best treat their clients.

• They spend at least 30 minutes with you; often they spend an entire hour with you.

• They ask how you FEEL and then they listen to what you say.

• They understand the body as a whole and thus treat the body as a whole.

• Many of them understand drug interactions so thoroughly that they could double as your pharmacist.

• They never denigrate holistic health care; instead they integrate it into their knowledge base and practice.

• They actually do the basics that every doctor should do: take your temperature, your pulse, your weight and your blood pressure. If you are seeing a thyroid doc and they never bother to actually walk over to you and examine your thyroid, fire that doctor.

• They often have a nutritionist on staff or recommend that you see one.

• They treat you with respect and assume you are an intelligent being who can grasp the finer points of your illness.

• They say that their best knowledge has come from their patients, meaning as they help patient after patient back to a state of health, they learn something new with each case and that helps the next patient they see.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Senior Medical Advisor says "Don't dismiss 'cyberchoncriacs'" (survivethejourney.blogspot.com)
• Can doctors learn medicine from physician lounges? (kevinmd.com)
• Daily Dose: How Healthy is Your Thyroid? (dailywd.womansday.com)
• No End In Sight To The Armour Thyroid Shortage? (prweb.com)

Armour Thyroid Is Harder to Find than a Needle in a Haystack

Cover via Amazon

I have been hypothyroid most -- if not all -- of my life. I went to a lousy Austin endocrinologist who could do no better than shrug his shoulders at my three pages of symptoms that I brought to him for 5 years. I fired him and finally found a truly caring doctor who actually understands how the thyroid works. As I have gained my health and thus my life back, my anger at that harmful doctor is still present, though lessened somewhat by finally feeling healthy again. My good doctor has almost erased my wrath at the arrogant endocrinologist, but every now and then a news story crops up about thyroid medications (such as the one below) and my anger at the needless suffering of the millions of thyroid patients at the hands of their doctors and Big Pharma gets my mad going again.

I am now sure that I was first gluten intolerant and a lifetime of not knowing that whittled my thyroid gland down to nothing. Mr. Big Fancy Pants Endo -- who is paid thousands every year to give "lectures" by the makers of his favorite drugs, including Synthroid -- apparently has never heard of Celiac's or gluten intolerance and probably has never even heard of gluten itself. He certainly never suggested that I may have some serious food allergies that caused all of my health symptoms.

I was put on Armour Thyroid on March 8, 2007 by my new doctor. I have that date marked on my calendar every year and I celebrate it as that is the date I started to get my life back. I had been practically bedridden for most of 2005-2006, so when my brain fog started to lift and my energy levels came back, I was in love with Armour Thyroid as that is the drug that made health possible for me.

I was on Armour Thyroid until the summer of 2009, when for some incomprehensible reason, the makers of Armour changed the 100-year old formula that worked wonders for countless thyroid patients. I began to feel hypo again. I also felt nauseous from something the genius makers of Armour decided to add to the formula. The company ignored pleas from thyroid patient advocates and refused to answer why they changed the formula. So most of us switched to another form of thyroid called Nature-thyroid. You can guess what happened next -- that also became nearly impossible to find.

Synthetic thyroid brands such as Synthroid simply do not work for me and for thousands of other hypothyroid patients as well. We have to have thyroid that is not synthetic or we remain ill.

What would happen in the national media if a major maker of insulin suddenly changed their formula and diabetics everywhere began to feel ill from the new formula? What if the makers of the most popular statin drug started playing around with that formula and people felt ill from that change? Would there not be a national outcry?

It is incredibly sad to me that we have to become health detectives and figure out for ourselves why we feel like shit. It is even sadder that once we finally find a medicine that gives us hope for a healthy life again, that medicine is suddenly changed and no longer does what it should for thousands of sufferers.

But saddest of all, you have to find that special doctor who refuses to be told how to treat patients based on what an insurance company thinks is best and instead relies on his or her training AND he/she bothers to listens to the actual symptoms the patient presents. Every day I say a small prayer of thanks to the thyroid patient advocates whom I have never met in person but who I count as dear friends as they are the one who directed me to the doctor who cared enough to actually heal me. I have a pit in my stomach every time I meet someone new who has suffered at the hands of an unknowledgeable and lazy doctor who has permitted that patient's life to ebb away until there isn't much there anymore.

For more information about the importance of getting on the right thyroid medicine, please bookmark Stop the Thyroid Madness and make it your personal thyroid Bible. Also check out Thyroid patients panicked as medication disappears.

Related articles by Zemanta

• No End In Sight To The Armour Thyroid Shortage? (prweb.com)
• Misdiagnosis FACT (thyroidlife.blogspot.com)
• Study Links Thyroid Disease to Non-Stick Chemicals (nlm.nih.gov)
• Wait For It... (thyroidlife.blogspot.com)
• Daily Dose: How Healthy is Your Thyroid? (dailywd.womansday.com)