Is a Doctor With About 5 Specialties Smarter or More Dangerous Than Doctors With One Specialty?
Question by Gianni: Is a doctor with about 5 specialties smarter or more dangerous than doctors with one specialty?
I’ve just visited a doctor with the biggest ego i’ve ever seen. He was arrogant but yet I’ve never heard of him before. He claims to be a Anesthesiologist, Addictionologist, Psychiatrist, Addiction Psychiatrist, Family Practice, Osteopathic Doctor and there’s more but I can’t think of it right now. Is this possible? Is it because he is terrible at doing just one thing? He told me my neurologist(top100 in the country) was much lower than him and he is basically god. Is this guy a quack or what?I’ll provide his name if need be.
Best answer:
Answer by N
It is easy to verify his training and credentials by visiting your state health department website where you can check where he went to medical school and did his residency training and fellowships.
It is highly impractical to have all this training because they don’t typically go together and would take many years to complete without being able to practice in each specialty to the best of his ability.
Answer by Bob B
Sounds a bit suspicious to me.
It’s not unheard of for doctors to do more than one specialty, but even then I’ve rarely seen more than two. In the rare cases that a doctor does do more than one, it’s usually either because they are related specialties (e.g. in my health system, most hematologists do joint hematology/pathology), or if they’ve retrained.
Also, for reference, it takes about 5 years for a doctor to train in a given specialty. Certification in 5 specialties would take, at a minimum, 15-20 years, probably more (and I’d like to see how he got much experience after training in each one).
All in all, this doesn’t sound right to me. In addition, being a specialist “osteopathic doctor” sets off a few alarm bells for quackery- osteopathy isn’t supported by clinical evidence and isn’t looked upon all that favourably in the medical profession. Even for those that don’t use osteopathy regularly, there’s still a bit of a stigma associated with being a DO rather than an MD among doctors.
So yeah, sounds a bit dubious to say the least.