Outstanding Physician Specialists

To get good medical care, you need to form a relationship with a primary care physician. This should be a family practitioner, an internist, or a pediatrician (for children). But given the complexities of modern medicine and the limits on the knowledge any person can absorb, your primary care doctor will feel it necessary to refer you to a specialist for many health care problems.

If you have a primary care doctor you trust, you will naturally want to put considerable stock in his or her recommendations But it is useful to have some knowledge of the area's best specialists so that you can discuss the choices with your primary care physician.

In an effort to identify some of the Bay Area's best specialists, we surveyed roughly 13,500 area physicians and (at the same time we were asking them to rate hospitals and HMOs for CNECKBOOK, Volume 8, Number 2) we asked them to tell us which specialists, in 30 different fields, they "would consider most desirable for care of a loved one." Nearly 600 physicians responded with thousands of recommendations.

The list below contains the names of physicians who were mentioned multiple times by other Bay Area physicians. Names appear in the specialty category chosen by the surveyed physicians.

Immediately following each physician's name we report the number of mentions received in our survey. Because of the nature of the survey, physicians in some specialties with large numbers of practitioners are unlikely to be mentioned more than a few times while physicians in specialties with only a few practitioners but a fairly large number of patients may get a large number of mentions Accordingly, in some specialties we have listed specialists mentioned as few as three times; in other specialties, the cutoff was more than eight mentions.

We have included on the list physicians in the three primary care fields-family practice, internal medicine, and pediatrics. Because recommendations were spread across many hundreds of physicians in these fields, very few received even three mentions. So our list of physicians in these primary care fields doesn't begin to include the hundreds of top-quality primary care doctors in the area. But since we had this list, even though it is short, we thought you would want us to share it with you.

On the list, we indicate where each physician graduated from medical school and his or her year of graduation. The list also shows what Board Certifications each doctor holds. Board certification means that a physician has taken several years of practical training in a field after graduating from medical school and has passed a difficult exam in that field. Information on board certification and medical school information for board certified doctors comes from a 1997 list compiled by the American Board of Medical Specialists (ABMS). (If we could not find a doctor on the ABMS list, we have not listed board certification for that doctor, though it is possible that some certified doctors do not appear on that list or that we failed to identify some listed doctors. It is also possible that some doctors' listed certifications might have expired by the time you read this.) Addresses and phone numbers (and medical school information for doctors who are not listed as board certified by ABMS) come from calls we made to the doctors' offices.

Obviously, there are some possible biases in a list like this. Doctors could recommend themselves or close colleagues or other doctors with whom they have financially beneficial back-and-forth referral arrangements. Since we asked for recommendations in 30 specialty fields,, however, it is likely that most doctors were mentioning many specialists with whom they had no financial connection.

It is also possible that some doctors who got favorable mentions did so just because they are well-known. They might have gotten negative mentions from other doctors if we had asked for negatives.

Nonetheless, favorable mentions bye number of doctors-the more the better-are likely to be a good sign. Our list should steer you to some very good candidates.

Keep in mind that we didn't ask about all special- so some physicians did not have an opportunity to be included on our list.