What makes a good primary care doctor?

So why don’t you guys make sure you get paid for spending more time with your patients? It reduces your likelihood of a malpractice claim as well.

Proceduralist don’t need to talk to their patients? Poppycock. They don’t, but they need to if they want to practice good medicine.

The surgeon who didn’t take a history put my Mama under general and did a wide excision to take off a suspicious lesion of. . psoriasis. He never even took a history to find out she had it and the trusting old soul went under the knife without questioning. . . but the procedure was skillfully done.

Before that, my father had a cardiac catheritization for symptoms due to hyperthyroidism . . .the cardiologist never bothered to take a history. “My son the doctor” heard about the cath being scheduled the day before and made sure that they were informed of the history so they got the thyroid studies that revealed the problem on the way to the cath lab. But at least the unnecessary procedure was well done.

Doctors who don’t talk to their patients are half-ass doctors no matter what kind of medicine they pretend to practice. They don’t call it history AND physical for nothing.