What Makes a Good Doctor?

Does TV Reflect Real Life?

"I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV."

Everyone's favorite TV doctor nowadays is House, the crotchety doctor on ABC who hasn't got the greatest bedside manner, but if you want to find out if you have some kind of rare exotic disease then he's your man. There have been a lot of TV docs over the years starting with the dashing Dr. Kildare who was eventually replaced with kindly old Dr. Marcus Welby. Most post-Welby doctors have been of the dashing sort with a few notable exceptions like the characters on Scrubs. (Check out CNN's the 25 most popular doctors on TV. www.cnn.com)

Doctors have become much more specialized now. It's not uncommon for a person with a couple of chronic diseases to be seeing more that 3 or 4 different doctors. My uncle has vision problems from diabetes and also cataracts and he sees 4 different eye doctors, one for the cataracts, a retina specialist, a general ophthalmologist, and a specialist specializing in neurological diseases of the eye. I guess all that specialization is a good thing, but I once went to my internist to get rid of a boil and had to reschedule a treatment with a skin specialist. If you want to eliminate waste in the health care system then I think they should bring back the general practitioner and only use specialists when the problem is beyond the scope of the garden variety M.D.'s grasp.

Another way to help eliminate costs would to bring back the house calls. Maybe most of these could be taken care of by nurse practitioners that could access the situation, get the vitals, and then report back to the physician. I guess something similar to this is being done by some of the call-a-paramedic services and the drop-in clinics that have sprung up at some of the area drugstores.