Practice Dummies

After writing the post that listed the doctors who have seen for the eye/s, it occurred to me that the three I most recommend–Magdalena G. Krzystolik, Heinrich Krosschell and to a lesser extent Harold Woodcomb –share something that all the other doctors lacked.
The three who did best by me each essentially owned the practice. Krzystolik and Woodcomb are listed first among their associates on their letterhead and in their advertising. Krosschell is his practice.
Now that I have noticed this, I will probably never see a new doctor, for eyes or anything else, who is not the principal doctor within the practice.
When choosing a doctor, I want the head honcho who can make the decisions. I want the one who had ambition enough to branch out on hir own.
What I do NOT want is people like Koch’s Michael O’Brien or the Smiley clown who briefly worked for Woodcomb. They are associates, and thus employees. Any employee in a business needs to be able to rationalize hir salary, and the subordinate doctors in any practice can be under any level of real or imagined pressure to increase their billings. Their financial contribution to the practice may often take precedence over patient care. This is America: healthcare is a business.
This newly realized pattern among the doctors I have seen applies equally well to Paul Arrigg and Deborah K. Schlossman at the Joslin Eye Clinic. The latter demonstrated the worst of paid employees: she tried to leave a paper trail of work that she had not actually fully preformed and was rushing out the door to leave on a Friday. Arrigg strung me along with separately and steeply billed follow-up visits and tests and in-house referrals that generated separate bills, all in preparation for procedures he had no intention of performing.
The near year of treatment with Arrigg allowed my vision to worsen, which all but guaranteed less success with the eventual retina reattachment not performed at Joslin.)  My association with Arrigg ended when I persisted in my interest for the procedures he had outlined.  He then told me I would be better off seeking treatment more local to me in Rhode Island.
I doubt the retina reattachment would have been necessary if O’Brien had not scared me into the PRP laser. I’m sure to have been forgotten in a flow of new paying patients since then, but they took in fees and "earned" their salaries back then. Their mothers ought to be proud.
The employees will always worry about their job first, even above what is best care for the patient. Only the primary owner has the motivation to keep the long term reputation of the practice as a priority.