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I'm not elite enough in any respect to really merit an elite doctor. I go to the doctors' office nearest my house. My doctor is a nice Indian lady. Maybe she's good, maybe she's not, who knows.
I encourage this attitude, it's extremely hard to know if your doctor is good or not because the things that are available for a patient to know are generally customer service things that are often extremely uncoupled from actual medical knowledge and practice ability. Very common for people with good customer service skills to be bad doctors.
Unless having bad customer service correlates with being a good doctor (House was right?) then it seems like it would still make sense to search for one with good reviews.
It does, it's very common for patients to ask for things they don't need or for things that may be bad for them (classic examples are controlled substances and antibiotics). People don't like being told things like "just wait out the infection, it is viral" or "well I know you are in pain, but actually the narcotics are bad for you." People who just prescribe like crazy get better reviews.
Inpatient things can be a bit more different, but those encounters don't generally result in reviews.
And that's not counting things like psychiatry where a good psychiatrist is always going to get angry reviews from certain classes of patients.
The classic example that comes to mind here is "Have you tried eating healthier, getting more exercise, and losing weight?"
"Your diabetes is so advanced your limbs are falling off." "Stop fat shaming me."
You are taking that cartoon out of context. It isn't saying that the patrient's arm fell off because of diabetes. It's showing the patient complaining about one thing, and the doctor telling him routine boilerplate about losing weight that has nothing whatsoever to do with the patient's problem. The patient is not ignoring the doctor's advice about weight, the doctor is ignoring the patient's complaint by mentioning weight.
Note that the cartoon nowhere says "diabetes" or "fat shaming".
Yes. And the real life version of that cartoon is Barry Deutsch telling his doctor about health problems caused by his enormous fatness and then not liking his doctor correctly blaming his weight.
The real life version of that cartoon is a patient who has a condition unrelated to his weight, but which is less fanciful than an arm falling off, and the doctor mentioning weight and ignoring his actual condition.
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