Family Doctor or Specialist for Serious Problems?

A while back, I did a deposition of a family physician. The deposition was regarding a cardiovascular disease. During the deposition, I began to ask the family physician general questions regarding the symptomology of the disease and what signs she would look at to diagnose the patient that they had this cardiovascular disease. To my amazement, the good doctor could only name one of about 7 symptoms. The symptom she named was usually only seen in the worst cases of the disease. I began to ask her if the other symptoms could be indicative of this cardiovascular disease and she said no. Of course I came out of the deposition thinking that I had tore her up and that she had misdiagnosed and been unable to diagnose the symptoms of the disease.

However, I later began thinking about how commonplace this type of misdiagnosis could be. Family physicians seem to be great in giving physicals, diagnosing the flu and other pathogens, however, should they be trying to treat and/or diagnose heart conditions et. al. I have decided that for me and my family, when it comes time to deal with heart issues or even heart checkups, I’m going to a specialist.

I have a sneaky feeling there are a lot of unqualified family physicians attempting to treat heart disease and other disease processes that a specialist would better treat.