These days we think that you/we should do our own research to locate the best specialist or specialists for us to see, if we need to see one, as the recommendations from GPs are often not very reliable.
This a frightening thought – the very worst specialists are hardly kept in business by patient recommendations, but by GP referrals!!!
Further to this post, one of our other readers tells us that a GP he’d been using for 5 or 6 years, who he thought was quite good, referred him to a specialist who turned out to be perhaps the worst doctor on the planet, amongst other things, damaging him for life, and further, that if he’d done his own research, and not trusted his GP, he would have quickly picked up that this specialist was to be avoided like the plague.
(And all the indications since are that the GP concerned just doesn’t care.)
The irony is that, when we send emails to specialists outlining our symptoms and asking them whether helping people with these symptoms is within their “areas of expertise,” (as we always do these days,) a lot of the time they or their assistants come back with, “Have you discussed this with your GP?” The specialists are always saying nice things about GPs because they rely on them so much to send them patients.
It’s a strange system we live under!