How to find a Doctor

When I was heavier, I looked for heavy docs by looking at their glamour shots. I liked the one GP guy a lot, he didn't take it easy on me as I got out of shape but seemed either to have remember med school or to have read up on diabetes. He told me a lot of stuff that I sort of ignored, thinking I knew "everything", but later came to get used to, e.g. counting carbs. Then, when I finally did what he'd been suggesting for years, and said "I want a pump" he said "you need to see an endo for that".

I sort of thought he might've been relieved but I had 2x endos to choose from. The head of the dept. guy, older, white. This was in Champaign, IL, a diverse community but also the "medical center" for a lot of small towns. The other doc was younger, Indian and I chose her, reasoning that old, white guy would have more patients given the demography. I got right in and was pumping a few weeks later. She was brilliant at math and did a great job turning my cluster%^&$ of a log into a very close approximation of what my doses needed to be.

Champaign while a medical center, DOES service a lot of smaller towns in the area. My suggestion in finding an endo, if there is a medical center where you live at, a lot of medical centers have doctors affiliated with it. I live in Norfolk VA, and the big medical center here is Sentara, they have a wonderful web site that you can go on, and narrow your search by specialty. My Endo is part of their medical group. As far as appointment availiblity goes, thats just really dependent on where you live. This area has a pretty decent amount of doctors to choose from, so my wait time was about a couple of weeks to get in.

In my medical journeys, I selected a new endo who seemed perfect on paper. He was prominent in the profession, even being on the task force that developed the AACE diabetes guidelines. He was recommended by many in the medical profession as really smart. I thought he could help me.

Boy I was wrong. The man was a nightmare as a person. He had no bedside manner. Every time he saw me, he would tell me I had diabetes because I was way too fat. We cycled through medication after medication, all to no effect. Every 5-10 minute appointment was the same, he never listened and halfway through the appointment he would face away from me and dictate what he thought was wrong with me and how my treatment should change.

The last straw was when I found out he had been paid $250K by pharmaceutical companies.

So I fired him. Looking back, I should have done it much earlier. And I undertook a search for a new doctor, trying to avoid my mistakes. I wrote about my search a year ago and you may find some of the resources and suggestions in that discussion helpful. And fortunately, my former "feeding at the pharma trough" endo is on the east coast, so you shouldn't have any problem avoiding him.

ps. I am very happy with my current endo.