A Doctor Can Be Beloved by Your Community and Still Be Wrong for You
Recently, I took the recommendations that had accumulated in one of the local WhatsApp groups I started and turned them into spreadsheets.
This will surprise absolutely no one who knows me.
People ask the group for all kinds of recommendations, and the responses are genuinely useful. The problem is that a few days later, those names are buried beneath hundreds of other messages. I wanted to collect the information somewhere people could find it again.
The contractor recommendations were fairly straightforward. I could list the person, the kind of work they did and any comments people had shared.
The doctor recommendations felt different.
I began with the same basic structure: name, specialty, location and contact information. But as I worked through the messages, I realized I needed to include a caveat. A list can tell you which doctors other people recommend. It cannot tell you whether you will have the same experience. The same applies to contractors. I have had two different handymen who have done well with me, but others have experience flakiness and crazy pricing quotes for similar work.
I know that because one of the doctors beloved by many people in my community is someone I would never see again.
The Doctor Everyone Loved
In the summer of 2018, I went to my primary-care doctor because I felt off.
I did not have one neatly defined symptom or a theory about what was wrong. I knew my own body, and something did not feel right.
He dismissed my concerns.
By November, I had developed what I initially thought was a clogged milk duct from breastfeeding. Then the area became larger and did not go away.
I tried to make an appointment with my OB/GYN, but I could not get in for another couple of months. Waiting that long did not feel like a reasonable option.
Fortunately, one of the parents in my son’s class was able to see me the next day. Other people in the community helped me reach an oncologist much more quickly than I would have been able to on my own.
Eventually, I returned to my primary-care doctor for a preoperative appointment. He acknowledged that perhaps he should not have dismissed my earlier concerns. Looking back, he could identify things we might have done differently.
By then, I had been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer.
The same doctor is highly recommended by many people in my community. His name comes up regularly when someone asks for a primary-care doctor. Many of the people who speak most enthusiastically about him are men.
They may have had genuinely excellent experiences with him. He may listen carefully to them, respond when they need help and provide exactly the kind of care they want from a primary-care doctor.
Their experiences are real.
So is mine.
I would never go back to him.
A Recommendation Is One Person’s Experience
When the same doctor’s name appears repeatedly in a Facebook group, WhatsApp conversation or neighborhood listserv, it begins to look like a consensus. If ten people recommend one doctor and only two mention another, the first doctor appears to be the safer choice.
But recommendations are not votes, even when we collect them in a spreadsheet.
Ten people may love a particular doctor because they have received excellent routine care for years. That does not tell me how the doctor responds when the symptoms are vague, the first explanation does not fit or the patient keeps insisting that something is wrong.
The experience of a generally healthy man may not tell me very much about how the same doctor will respond to a woman describing changes in her body that she cannot yet explain.
Other differences matter too. Some patients want a doctor who will spend time talking through every possibility. Others value efficiency and easy access. One person may appreciate a direct communication style that another experiences as dismissive.
A recommendation can tell me that someone had a good experience. Without more context, it cannot tell me whether that doctor is a good match for what I need.
What Community Lists Do Not Capture
Positive and negative experiences also tend to appear differently in community conversations.
It is easy to post that you love a doctor. It is much harder to describe a negative experience in a group where the doctor, the doctor’s relatives or dozens of longtime patients may be reading. People may be willing to discuss those experiences privately but not attach their names to them in a public conversation.
That means a recommendation thread may contain plenty of enthusiastic endorsements while leaving out some of the information that would matter most to someone choosing a doctor.
Even when someone does raise a concern, it can disappear beneath a much larger number of positive responses. The positive recommendations do not make the negative experience untrue. The negative experience does not erase the positive ones.
They are different patients describing different interactions.
That is harder to represent in a spreadsheet than a simple tally of names.
Using the List as a Starting Point
I still think community recommendation lists are valuable. I would not have spent the time creating the spreadsheets if I did not.
I am just more cautious about what the lists can tell us.
A name on the list is a place to begin. From there, I want to know why someone recommended the doctor. What kind of care did they receive? How recently did they see the doctor? Did the doctor listen when the answer was not immediately obvious? How did the office respond when something felt urgent?
Not every recommendation needs to include a medical history or a detailed account of someone’s care. People should share only what they are comfortable sharing. But even a little context can be more useful than another vote for the same name.
The list also cannot become a permanent judgment about a provider. Doctors change practices. Office staff changes. Insurance participation changes. One person’s experience, whether positive or negative, cannot predict every future interaction.
What the list can do is preserve a collection of experiences and give someone a more informed place to start.
The Community Was Also What Helped Me
My experience is not an argument against turning to the community for help.
When the formal systems failed me, people in my community were the reason I received care.
I could not get a timely appointment through the usual process. A parent from my son’s class saw me the next day. Other community members helped me get to an oncologist quickly. They knew whom to contact and helped me navigate a system I had never expected to need.
That informal knowledge mattered enormously.
The problem was not that people shared recommendations. The problem was believing that a frequently recommended name told the whole story.
Now, when someone tells me that they love a doctor, I want to know why. I want to understand what the doctor helped them with and what happened when something was not straightforward. I also want there to be room for someone to say, “That was not my experience,” without treating one person’s story as proof that everyone else must be wrong.
I will probably continue turning sprawling WhatsApp conversations into spreadsheets because that is apparently who I am.
I just no longer think the most useful information is the number of times a name appears.
It is the experience behind the recommendation.
