[Think free or die]

Very disturbing report. We encountered an outrageously incompetent ER doctor at a seashore hospital in NJ a few years ago when our then 3-year old son suddenly developed severe pain in his hip. We quickly decided to cut short our trip and took him to the ER at Philadelphia's Childrens' Hospital. It was a night and day difference in basic competence. The useless ER doc at the shore was from somewhere in Africa, barely spoke English, and appeared to know very little about much of anything. It is an outrage that people like this are permitted to practice medicine. It's a violation of the public trust.

[nuconvert]

Agree. To make matters worse, the AMA and state med. boards are disgustingly slow at getting rid of incompetent Drs.

[JusPasenThru]

Folks, get used to this.

Back in the sixties and seventies, a career in medicine was very appealling. It allowed our altruistic motives to flourish, and it certainly allowed its practitioners to earn a good living. Now physicians represent a summer home or new Mercedes for trial lawyers, and there's very little we can do about it. Good young students are sometimes attracted to medicine, but the bulk of them are heading for careers in law because they can earn bigger bucks in a shorter period of time, especially if they get involved in mass torts. In order to take up the manpower slack, more and more physicians of dubious educational or cultural backgrounds are playing a more and more important role in American medicine. This, combined with the death of the Hippocratic oath, which specifically condemns abortion and physician-assisted suicide, means that all you aging baby boomers are going to be in a heap of trouble when you turn 65 and try to find a good doctor who accepts new Medicare patients.

I don't know a single doc over 50 who wouldn't retire in a heartbeat if they could afford it. If the stock market ever rebounds, a lot of patients are going to see their docs vanish. A big chunk of them will also be forced out of business because they can't get or can't afford malpractice insurance. Hell, the longer a doc is in practice, the more time he has to get sued, and the more likely he is to lose his malpractice insurance. I couldn't design a system better to get rid of experienced docs and replace them with a bunch of losers.