Medical Specialists - Fact or Fiction?

April 30, 2010

Recently Injury Alliance posted an article entitled, “Is Your Specialist Really A Specialist?”. I personally know of four cases in the past year where a supposed specialist has misrepresented his qualifications to his patients. I find it really offensive that a doctor would do this. Why mislead patients?

You might ask, “Who cares? If the doctor is good at his preferred area of medicine, why don’t you just leave him alone?” Well, because the good ones don’t lie about their qualifications usually. They know they’re good at what they do. They don’t need to exaggerate their paper qualifications.

But I suppose that the biggest reason I can’t leave it alone is because people will never be able to be confident that a doctor has the background, experience, and training to treat a special condition, unless someone (ie. the College of Physicians & Surgeons) can assure you that the doctor has that background, experience, and training you need for the best treatment of your condition. Specialist designations exist to ensure that the experience and training meets an expected reasonable standard.

Sure, there are lots of circumstances where a specialist is not available to treat your condition. But isn’t it your right to know who is treating you. And, yes, there are plenty of doctors without specialties who are quite capable of treating special conditions. But rarely do the capable ones feel it’s necessary to lie to you and lead you to believe they are a ‘specialist’ just to garner your trust and admiration.

If you have suspicions about your own specialist’s training or experience and you worry that they might not be meeting the expected standards, look up their qualifications on the College of Physicians and Surgeons website ( www.cpso.on.ca ). And, feel free to speak up on this blog. Let us know your thoughts on this topic. We’d love to hear from you.

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