Kendall, I don't want to hijack your thread, and I'm very glad it's turning out that your condition is benign, but I wanted to bring something into balance. I find it disturbing, though not at all surprising, that the article on the "Quack Hotline" gave plenty of examples of doctors whose public listing concealed their nefarious crimes. However, there were no examples of good doctors whose reputations and practices could be irreparably damaged by this kind of publicity. (The OB/GYN mentioned in the last example may have been such a doctor, but the tone of the article indicated he was probably hiding something.)

There are many excellent doctors who have been sued for "malpractice" because of a bad but unavoidable result, or because they were part of a group, or they briefly treated a patient who later suffered an injury because of another doctor's malpractice. Most, but not all, of those suits are eventually dismissed. Unfortunately, some of them wind up as unjustified negative information on the doctor's record. I'm on the credentials committee of our community hospital...believe me, it happens. I know the strengths and weaknesses of the National Practitioners Data Bank very well. The lawyers and the courts and the insurance companies and the government agencies aren't perfect, either. And in a small community, or in a big city with lots of competition among doctors, it does not take much to ruin a physician's livelihood. I'd just ask you all to think about that.

There's no question that the crooked and incompetent and criminal doctors have to be found out and prevented from harming other people. But sometimes an apparently simple solution like this "hotline" may have unintended consequences.

And Kendall, if you check the link to Dr. Zeitels provided by lamarca above, you will see that in fact he is Board-certified in Otolaryngology (Ear-nose-throat surgery, or "ENT") and specializes in throat and voice disorders. So don't worry, OK?

Aloha,
Mark