Medscape's Best and Worst

As each calendar year reaches its conclusion, many organizations attempt to compile best and worst lists, be it TV shows, movies, cars, people of prominence or infamy that bring character and maybe immortality to the year that will soon fade into history

Medicine like any other pursuit has its heroes and its scoundrels.  I would take a safe guess that all physicians can name in an instant the five teachers who shaped them and the five guys they thought should be reported to the state board, if not the FBI.   For the bad apples, we contented ourselves as residents to mostly scoring them with a lot of zeroes on our attending physician evaluation form but never pursued anything seriously punitive.  For the benefactors, we not only gave them higher scores but assimilated some elements of their revered practices into what became of us professionally forever.  We know who they are and what they did on our behalf, even if nobody else does.

We also come across medical colleagues who we do not know but find their way into the medical and secular news for their exceptional deeds that reach beyond our personal experience.  Some win Nobel Prizes, some swindle Medicare.  In recent years we have passively received enough lurid news in print or electronically that it registers as our daily expected dose of world affairs.  Some respond, most don't but file some imprint deep into the cerebrum where it might be retrieved if ever needed but does not stay with our awareness for very long.  At the other pole, when we attend our annual meetings, some physicians get awards while we sit in the audience and clap.  Professional achievement always gets our admiration.  We see the news of physicians gunned down, including a personal college friend killed in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre or by a disgruntled patient, usually not the superstars of medicine but professional colleagues who get some combination of sympathy and honor for the dignity that their abruptly halted careers brought to the medical profession.

While our recognition of these physicians tends to have the trajectory of a funnel where stuff goes in the big end, gets concentrated and disappears in a moment out the small end, we are fortunate to have an organization like Medscape that identifies, catalogs, and retains these positive and negative outliers each year in an easily searchable way.  The list comes out in mid-December and is traceable at least back to 2011.  Being something of a news voyeur, I scrolled through the current roster as it came passively to my email inbox.  What makes physicians, and sometimes scientists, heroes or villains can be hard to tease out on one year's list, but by searching back about five years, laudatory and despicable themes emerge with some consistency, which may not be all that different than how we each individually assigned the best and worst physicians who we personally encountered between medical school and retirement.

The rascals have a lot more consistency, and most years larger numbers, than the exemplars.  With rare exceptions they have traded in their white coats for orange jumpsuits.  Some are outright predators, engaging in assaults on mostly female or pediatric patients.  Others engage in various forms of lucrative unconscionable care.  The scientists among us might call them errors of the First Kind, assigning significance to diseases that were not present.  The intent takes it outside the realm of error.  Patients without cancer received chemotherapy, normal coronary arteries got stented, inappropriate but systematic retinal photocoagulation, and any variety of excessive bodily invasions from sinus surgeries to repetitive skin biopsies.  While these docs seem more profiteers than predators, there is something inherently evil about intentional unneeded care.  Over the few years of my review, there were few overtly incompentents, other than a few surgeons functioning above their level of training, but generally medical schools and residencies produce capable people, though not always ethical people.  The next common category are the profiteers.  There are a lot of these.  They probably caused little bodily harm to vulnerable people so, in my mind at least, would fall one level less on my personal evil-meter.  They are more financial cheats than medical ones, though a few cut corners by obtaining less expensive medicines from authorized sources then billing for the real thing.  But mostly these doctors arranged for others to due financial processing of bogus services for financial gain but not medical harm.  There were a lot of these on each annual list.  And finally we have a handful of unfortunate people who offered suitable care but got videotaped engaging in mockery of patient or staff or fulfilling a dream of being a rapper while removing a body part.  Poor judgment probably, worthy of a worst of doctors list, probably not.

Medscape's best of doctors each year fall into more categories with too few to make generalizations of how the majority of practitioners can upgrade themselves to be more like them.  One common category of people worthy of admiring though not emulating are those whose recognition that year was brought about by their untimely death.  They did good work, for sure, but it was the car accident or plane crash while on a mercy mission that caused Medscape to include those physicians that year.  About an equal number also arrived on the annual recognition list by appearing in obituaries first.  These people had lifetime achievements, mostly in advancing the science of medicine.  Their CV's no doubt had a few awards while still functioning well enough to appreciate the adulation their work had earned.

There is another very large category of praiseworthy doctors whose medical knowledge and skill does not tower any higher than the rest of us, though their dedication and tenacity might.  Each list has physicians, mostly still alive and working, who enabled people at the margins of medical care to have better access.  Some travel into the Third World to bring this about.  Some set up rural clinics, some make a career of treating medical pariahs, the modern version of lepers perhaps, people who a lot of us would groan if we saw those patients on our schedule.

One final category that appears on every list, probably no more skilled medically than anyone else, but who endured unusual challenges to complete their medical degree.  These include professional and Olympic athletes, refugees from war zones partly completed with their education who had to flee and reapply with some difficulty in an unfamiliar country with a new language.  One started as a patient, a teenage surgical ICU alumnus with life threatening gunshot injuries who became captivated by what the surgeons were doing for him and then pursued his education under burdensome conditions but prevailed.  One does not need to be the most prodigious clinical or science maven to excel.  Pursuing a dream relentlessly is an option available to most of us in some form.

So what becomes of these people?  The medical scoundrels amass quite a lot of prison time.  Do they remain bottom feeders in custody, or might there still be some spark of benevolence that once got the favor of the Admissions Committee?  Do they sit in their cells and mope or do they impart the literacy skills and science aptitude that they have to be of benefit to other inmates who had less going for them at the time of their arrests than the doctors did?  There are medical reporters for Medscape and elsewhere that could pursue that direction.

And the Top Docs who are active, do they continue to inspire colleagues and patients with that same persistence they used to excel so that others might be more dedicated to self-management and responsibility for the diseases that they have?  Appearance on the Medscape exceptional list should have an enduring presence beyond the 15 minutes of fame or infamy that Andy Warhol thought all people are entitled to have.