Top Docs

In this definitive list, we present the Bay Area's best doctors, as chosen by the real experts-their fellow physicians.

THE DILEMMA IS SIMPLE: YOU OR ONE OF YOUR KIDS GETS SICK, SENDING you in search of a trustworthy doctor. At one time, you might have turned to a friend or family member for a referral, but in the bustling, transient Bay Area, those local connections have often been broken. Sure, you trust the produce guy at Whole Foods, but somehow that's not the same.

Doctors aren't in short supply‹with 47 pages of M.D. listings in the San Francisco Pacific Bell Smart Yellow Pages alone, even a Ph.D. would feel like a dummy when trying to pick a name. And forget using one of those Internet referral services: Matt Drudge still represents the Web's voice of authority.

The best place to turn is these very pages. The following list of 425 local doctors and medical specialists was compiled by the professional pollsters at Woodward/White, who asked physicians a simple question: "If you or a loved one needed a doctor in your specialty and you couldn't treat them yourself, to whom would you refer them?"

The answers, based on follow-up interviews and weighted to account for a doctor's potential bias for a colleague in his or her hospital, result in the largest peer-review-based evaluation in the medical profession. Only San Francisco magazine features this definitive list. Of course, your HMO or PPO may limit which doctors you're allowed to see, but armed with those guidelines and this easy-to-use list, you're in the best position to get great care.

We've also spotlighted five physicians who are doing extraordinary work in the crucial fields of integrative medicine, AIDS, cancer, child neurology, and cardiology. As Dr. Robert Burton, former chief of neurology at Mount Zion Medical Center, argues in his provocative essay "A Doctor's Lament" , medicine may indeed be getting too clinical, but these standout physicians give us reason to be optimistic.