>>1
>>>Sheesh, gotta do it: how do you judge that you get excellent care?
>>I use the same process that I use to decide anything else - did he/she meet the standards that reasonable people use?
>>Nothing magical. He/she either performed or didn't.
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>But how do you know? I'm going for my annual physical next week. My doc will decide what screening tests I should have, based on my history, my family history and what she finds in her exam (along with her experience and best practices). If she fails to recommend some screening and it later turns out it should have been done, will she have provided excellent care? What if she recommends a screening test that comes back negative because something I say or she finds raises red flags? In this case, I trust this doctor and this practice (which I've been using for my entire adult life and my parents used before me) and I've found that she and the practice as a whole do a good job of balancing caution against over-testing with caution against missing something.
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>So when you go see a provider with whom you don't have a history and who doesn't know all the details of your medical history, how do you know it's excellent care? Even if it seems right at the time, in some cases, you won't know for a long time if something wasn't done that should have been.
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>Tamar

The walk-in's that I use all have digital histories (finally) that they share within their network.
That means that anyone can see my complete history without ever having seen me before.
I go there for colds, earwax removal, etc.
I know it worked if I stop coughing and my ears aren't plugged up.
After seeing the needless suffering my late wife endured with countless screenings that yielded no benefit to anyone except those doing them and/or prescribing them, I've become soured on most of them.
As JR correctly notes, that experience left me with "a thing" about MD's. I can think of a least a dozen tests, costing tens of thousands of dollars that they inflicted on her to no avail.
The VA offers a pretty sensible annual exam and I've been using them for the past couple of years. They do their own lab work, so things are simpler.
Their MD's are all salaried and don't seem to be shilling the Big Pharma meds, making questionable referrals, or pushing questionable screenings as much as the previous MD I used for my annual exam.
Also, I never see the Big Pharma sales people at the VA that I saw regularly at private MD's.
That alone is almost reason enough for me to go there.