It may be wise to ask questions. Today, university medical education is often funded by Pharma (grants to chairs and departments, for research, dictating what shall be taught) and continued in the doctor's office during visits by drug company reps with high school educations and doctor prescribing info and personality profiles on their Bl*ckberries.
From an article at Maclean's
...horror stories have made Canadians wary, says Mario Canseco of Angus Reid Public Opinion, who oversaw the Maclean’s poll. “Not only do they worry that there will be mistakes, but they assume so,” he says. “Even if you’re happy with your GP, you see what’s happened to those around you. You think it may be your time next.”
For doctors, this is an unaccustomed, and not especially pleasant, spot to be in. For generations, physicians have enjoyed greater public respect and appreciation than practically any professionals—a reflection, perhaps, of their status in many communities as the most educated people in town. That’s changing, however, as post-secondary education becomes the norm and Canadians in general grow less deferential. “There used to be a very paternalistic relationship between doctors and their patients,” says Dr. Rocco Gerace, registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. “It worked both ways. Patients would essentially give doctors the decision-making ability, as opposed to considering options and then consenting. It’s changed dramatically, and I think for the better.”
That shift has been accelerated by the Internet, which puts not only diagnostic information but reviews of individual physicians at the fingertips of patients. RateMDs.com, a California-based site that went online in 2004, has doubled its traffic every year since, with Canadians as its most enthusiastic constituency. The site now has user-submitted ratings for over 85 per cent of Canadian doctors, and a surprising 45 per cent of its 1.2 million monthly visits originate in this country. The phenomenon speaks not only to patients’ doubts, but an appetite for frank criticism that Hugh MacLeod, chief executive of the Edmonton-based Canadian Patient Safety Institute, says will only grow. “For those in the system who think things are getting wild now,” he says, “put on your seat belts.”
All this crowd-sourcing raises an obvious question: are medical mistakes becoming more common? Or are they merely being amplified by proliferating media, both social and mainstream? Geoff Norman, a McMaster University psychologist who studies how doctors make errors, believes recent scandals played out in the media have simply caused patients to demand reviews and investigations, the coverage of which has fed impressions that things are going awry. Doctors are more willing to own up to mistakes, he argues, and he points to the publication in 2000 of “To Err Is Human,” a report by the Washington-based Institute of Medicine, as a watershed moment in encouraging practitioners to acknowledge their fallibility. “Now,” he says, “there’s almost like a legislative review process when something goes wrong.”
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/08/16/do-you-trust-your-doctor/
Print version
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/08/16/do-you-trust-your-doctor/print/
