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February 2007 send to a friend printable version
Get better care from your doctor

Choosing the right doctor
What 39,090 patients and 335 doctors have to say about how to make the most of your next appointment.
Sure, you love your doctors. But your visits to them might be more rushed than you realize, and you might not be following their instructions as well as you think you are.

Those are some of the findings of the Consumer Reports National Research Center’s survey of 39,090 patients about their doctor visits. We also asked 335 primary-care physicians about how things look from the other side of the exam table. More findings:
  • The overwhelming majority of patients said they were highly satisfied with their doctors and got better under their care. These are among the highest ratings of any services we’ve evaluated.
  • Almost one-third of the doctors failed to discuss side effects of prescribed drugs, and two-thirds never brought up costs of treatments and tests, patients said.
  • Patients stuck with uncommunicative doctors got much better results when they took active steps such as taking a friend or relative along on the visit or asking doctors directly about their experience treating similar cases.
  • Seventy-eight percent of doctors said patients asked them at least occasionally to prescribe drugs they had seen advertised on television, and 67 percent said they sometimes did so.
  • Doctors think the health-care system works much better for drug and health-insurance companies than for primary-care doctors and their patients.
Our survey had three parts. We asked 25,184 respondents to our 2006 Annual Questionnaire about visiting the doctor for treatment of their most bothersome illness. Over the summer of 2006, we asked 13,906 online subscribers to tell us about their preventive-care visits. (Our subscribers might not be representative of the population as a whole.) And in May 2006, we surveyed a random sample of 335 primary-care physicians drawn from a national panel.

We have used our survey findings, a review of the latest research on patient care, and interviews with experts to construct this guide to making your relationship with your physician the best it can be, starting with how to find a doctor in the first place.

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