Doctor Ratings: Finding The Physician That Cares

One of the best ways to find a new physician is to look at doctor ratings online, provided by a few sites that allow patients just like yourself to post their reviews of their experiences. Reading through these reviews can give you a much better picture of who is good and bad in your community when it comes to health care. Gone are the days of having to rely exclusively on your friends and family for their meager and potentially biased recommendations. While word of mouth has always been valuable, hearing an opinion from one or two people can't match having access to your entire city at once. Looking online will give you that broader range of opinions and help you to make a much more informed choice.

Whether you're looking for a specialist or someone you can take your kids to see when they are feeling under the weather, doctor ratings can help you make a choice. Finding a new physician is often one of the first things a parent will do when they move to a new town. Being unfamiliar with the new location and probably not having much of a social network, where can such a person turn when they need this kind of information? Unfortunately, it usually means picking someone blindly out of the phone book. This may seem okay—after all, a doctor is a doctor, right? Well, keep this joke in mind: what do you call someone who graduated at the bottom of their medical school class? Doctor. Do you want to take your kids—or yourself—to someone who just scraped past their schooling?

Doctor ratings can also provide you with a forum if you're dissatisfied following an appointment. For that matter, it also gives you a place you can rave following a great experience. Of course, these sites shouldn't be used exclusively as a place to rant. If you want to post about your experience, that's a good thing. However, you should keep in mind that others will want to use your review as a tool to help them find quality medical care. Put in lots of details and don’t forget to be objective and fair. Personal bias (such as disliking a physician because of their accent or their gender) really has no place in a good review. Judge your experience on the facts and report them as they happened. This way, sites such as these can continue to thrive and they won’t be bogged down in useless smear campaigns.