Finding a Dentist
Now that I am back in Gainesville, and I know I’ll be staying here a while, I want to find doctors here in town so I do not need to drive to my hometown every time I want to see a doctor like I did when I was going to school here.
I started my search by looking in the yellow pages. I found a good number of doctors that way, but I realized that I have no way of knowing which doctors are good and which are not. Normally, I would just go and try some out. This is what I did with Joy a weekend or two ago when we wanted to find a good, affordable place to wash our cars or get them cleaned for us. We just took our cars to two different places. Next time we’ll take them to two other places and so on until we know which place we like. This doesn’t work so well with doctore because it will cost you $100 or more for each visit.
With that in mind I hoped to find a doctor rating service. I did. I found several. Unfortunately, people in Gainesville haven’t really used these services much — aside from one person who wanted to give a negative rating about a doctor here in town. Of the sites that I found, I liked http://www.compledentist.com the best. It lists every dentist in town by name — not by practice name. Then you can rate each dentist. No one has really done the ratings thing yet, but this is a more complete listing of dentists than any yellow pages gave me.
The difficulty I am having in finding a dentist is inspiring another rant against the practice of medicine. I do not understand how we can all be so well informed and conscientious consumers of so many other goods and services, but when it comes to medicine we leave everything to chance.
Now that I have to pick blindly I am deciding on large, multiple doctor practice in one of the nicer areas of town. I don’t really have anything to base my decision on other than whether or not our insurance is accepted at the practice, so I am assuming that large means successful and nice area of town will mean nice office.
Now I still need to find a general practicitioner, a mechanic, an accountant, a banker, etc. At least I know where to get my cars and my teeth cleaned.
Posted by David under Help Wanted |