Before I moved to where I live now, I had a doctor's office open in my neighborhood I could walk to. At first I thought it was amazing and I started going there. It was a really fancy place, state of art, loads of diagnostic equipment and a limited on-site lab, almost a hospital. But pretty soon I realized I was almost always seeing Nurse Practitioners, or Doctors so fresh out of medical school they were still wet behind the ears.

Even worse, they were almost always wrong about the diagnosis and I'd find myself on 3 or 4 rounds of antibiotics, or would go to the pharmacy to pick up something and they'd let me know the cocktail I had just been prescribed had dangerous counterindications. I finally stopped going when I caught a doctor searching webmd when I was on my fourth return visit for a simple sinus infection that had turned into a terrible ear infection.

My next doctor wasn't much better. And I had really started to lose trust in the medical system and in medical training.

We moved a few years ago to a different city, and I hadn't found a doctor yet. One day I took sick with something, went to a local walk-in clinic in a strip mall used mostly by the local underprivileged immigrant community.

Luck would have it I now found an amazing doctor who's been 100% correct in every diagnosis and line of care for both me and my wife since - including some difficult and sometimes hard to diagnose issues. She has basically no equipment except a scale, a light, a sphygmomanometer, and a stethoscope. Does all of her work using old fashioned techniques like listening to breathing or palpation and will refer to the local imaging center or send out to the local lab nearby if something deeper is needed.

The difference in absolutely wild. I sometimes wonder if she and my old doctors are even in the same profession.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you don't like your doctor, try some other ones until you find a good one, because they can be a world difference in quality -- and don't be moved by the shine of the office.