In my experience, doctors are like programmers. Nobody really has any effective way to evaluate them, or at least, nobody does so on a broad basis or consisten

In my experience, doctors are like programmers. Nobody really has any effective way to evaluate them, or at least, nobody does so on a broad basis or consistently. Some of them can’t pass fizzbuzz. Some of them can churn out CRUD apps, but have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to anything else. Some of them are extremely dogmatic about design patterns and tooling and ignore anything they don’t like. Some of them are inattentive or poor listeners. Some of them assume it’s Problem X they’ve seen a million times, but it’s not. Some of them are assholes. Some of them are really sharp and really engaged, but get overly excited and reinvent the wheel or spend a lot of time doing stuff that’s completely unnecessary and maybe even harmful. I don’t know how to evaluate doctors until I see them, I have no idea if better doctors cost more or less, I doubt there’s a strong correlation because nobody else can evaluate them either. They either help me or they don’t. I think it absolutely is necessary that I should be able to have a history and see the same doctor, and that I should be able to see another doctor any time I want for the same condition for a second, third, or fourth opinion. I have seen this be absolutely necessary for myself and others with common conditions that were resolved after seeing a different doctor. I assume this is still possible in most if not all public health care systems (I live in the US but local doctors and hospitals are all government run, an interesting aside), but I am not sure. I recently had a conversation with a Canadian friend who has debilitating autoimmune disease his specialist is doing basically nothing for and he made it seem like it wasn’t possible, but I didn’t want to press.