Howard...I hope you read all my praises about you (most of them, if not all
of them are in the heartburn newsgroup).  I can search them and e-mail them
to you if you want.  They were based on my extreme admiration for you for
volunteering your personal time to this group and to the heartburn group,
and for appreciation of your medical knowledge - and that is it - it had
nothing to do with you attacking me - although I thought you would attack me
eventually because of my admitted negativity about your profession in
general, which I will not back down on.  Most of the patients who go to
doctors are medically ignorant - I am far from that.

I have been abused and insulted by doctors and I do not like them - and I
have been to what I would call incompetent doctors, and I have had my blood
lost in hospitals and have had my catscans misread by radiologists, and I
could write books about bad doctors.  So if you want to say it is my problem
and most of your patients don't dislike doctors, that is your opinion.  The
original poster of this thread seems to feel otherwise (but not to the
extent I do because most people have not been to as many docs as I have),
and I was just amplifying what he said, and what another person said later
on (which started this).

But you appear to be a good doctor like I said - if you weren't, you
wouldn't be volunteering your time to the ng's like you do.  I don't know
how your bedside manner is, or whether you are opened minded to your
patients doing research and asking you questions, that you may take wrong,
and dismiss them.  Sorry Howard, I do not like doctors - blame it on me if
you like, but I could give you detailed accounts of my bad experiences, that
certainly would prove it's not all my fault, or my personality causing the
problem.  That is not to say I may not be partly to blame.

It took me six years to get my last internist to call me by my first name
and he up and left.  He wasn't a bad doctor, and he used to admit I knew
more about certain details of certain things than he did, and he was right
out of his residency (doctors are not gods like most people think they are -
one individual can only know so much - that is obvious).  I bet you call
very few of your patients by their first names, or you don't know their
first names.  That is very important to me, just to feel comfortable, so you
don't feel you are just some chart in a lineup (like cattle waiting to be
slaughtered).

Medicine is not that cut and dry where you can just keep saying "next" (as
in next patient) .  Doctors need to communicate with their patients.  And
please don't tell me the standard response that you see patients all day
long and you can't remember them all.  I don't buy that.  Believe me, if I
was a doctor, I would know all my patients if they returned for followups,
and I would call them by their first name (unless they preferred otherwise).

Let me close by saying that a doctor's diploma, and the school he went to,
and his residency, and all his surgical skills, don't mean a thing if he
can't communicate with his patients, and make them feel comfortable when
they are talking to him, and let them ask reasonable questions about their
condition and their treatment options.  That is the key.  Without that, the
rest doesn't matter.  I do not believe I am alone on this either, but I
admittedly feel stronger than most other people do (who haven't been to as
many doctor's as I have).

I still like you Howard, and hope I can discuss my manometry and 24 hour ph
with you some day in the heartburn ng (the one that I had in Baltimore a
year and a half ago and I never got to talk to anyone about because of the
incompetence I told you about).   It would be better to do it by e-mail but
I'm sure you don't take e-mails.  I have been meaning to ask you about this
in the heartburn group, but I kept putting it off since I was sure you don't
take individual e-mails.  The urologist in Madrid I told you about does take
e-mails, in addition to his time in the ng, and I can definitely tell you he
is probably one of the finest, kind, caring, and knowledgeable doctors on
the planet, and boy do I wish he was my urologist :-) .

Incidentally I told the Madrid uro about you also (not by your name), and
how the two of you were similar, and how awesome you both were for
volunteering your time to the ng's. There are indeed very few doctors on the
planet that do that, so I will thank you again.  A lot of doctors have
websites for advertising their business, and a lot of doctors answer
e-mails, but you have to be their patient of course.  I like to think that
if a doctor volunteers in a ng, he is doing it more in the interest of
helping people globally, relative to their medical condition or problems.

Pete