Physician Reviews - Their Importance To Society
For as long as the internet has been around, people have been using it to exchange information about their favorite (and least favorite) products and services. But it wasn’t until fairly recently that physician reviews joined the mix. These sites provide an important societal function, however, and here’s how.
For whatever reason,
doctors were exempt from the same standards that every other product, service, and profession was held to. What was even more surprising was that when these sites began springing up, doctor’s groups were the first ones to complain, and complain loudly.
For one thing, going online and finding a wealth of physician reviews is a far cry from the old way of getting such information. You might try asking friends and coworkers who their doctor was and who they recommended. This might net you three or four different names, if you were lucky. What did this really give you to go on? Even today, if you see a doctor with only one or two reviews under his name, you don’t have a lot of information to use—and that’s one doctor. When three or four people give you three or four names, you might as well not have asked.
People are growing more and more concerned with the state of health care in this country. The population is divided when it comes to universal plans, but the insurance burden for both individuals and companies is getting to be too much to bear. Middlemen are making profits in the tens of billions and the average person is unlike to rave about their latest appointment. It’s clear that reform is in order, but certain types of reform just leave the average patient feeling more alienated than ever before. This is one of the good things about online physician reviews. They give a voice back to the man on the street.
Because technology is like a Pandora’s box, you can’t put things back into the bottle once they’ve escaped. It is beyond pointless for critics to try and fight physician reviews at this point. Still, there are those that argue that the system could be better developed. There’s no question about that. There needs to be safeguards put in place to protect doctors from libelous statements and customers from paid endorsements. Once these kinks have been worked out, however, you’ll be witness to a new era when it comes to transparency in the health care industry. It’s hard to see why anyone would regard this as a bad thing.
