How to find a Quantified self Doctor? (Or a doctor you can trust?)

I often don’t trust my doctor.

How can I find a doctor I can trust?

This would be my ideal doctor

  • Someone who is very knowledgeable, so he knows when to refer my to specialists
  • Someone who can help me with my Quantified Self experiments
  • Someone who thinks prevention is better than curing symptoms

How would you go about finding a doctor like this where you live? (I live in Denmark in Aalborg.)

Hello @LNP

That would be useful indeed :slight_smile:

You might increase your chances of finding such a physician by looking for ones working with athletes. People focusing on high level performance often are more into quantifying and less disease-driven.

let us know if you find her/him !

Thanks for the suggestion!

Your trust is rather vague. There needs to be quantification although as trust is a subjective issue probably more qualitative than quantative assessments. It is also a strong claim to make against a professional with decades of training; unless you too have the same training.

I can’t really answer your second question as here in the UK general practitioners effectively have a “parish” that they cover although they might take on someone who lives in an adjacent area. It can be a problem to find one who will accept a new patient onto their list. In my village there are two separate GP practices both with full lists and less than 10 doctors; mine has seven the other has two but they will also have locums to call on — for example the surgery with two has no female doctors on staff. You might think that that is enough doctors for a village except that according the last UK census there are 13,000 residents here. Meaning that the patient: doctor ratio is seriously large. In some areas of the UK it is much much higher; some places the ration is 10,000:1!

I trust the GPs at my surgery (the larger one). Sometimes there are disagreements over treatment. Our current one being whether I should take statins or not. My cholesterol readings were skewed at the time of the test because of a course of steriods. I have done my research — not anti-drug nor anti-vacc nor social media but real research in the medical literature — and found that the specific steriods I was prescribed were documented as raising cholesterol. Also, in the same literature, found enough research to dissuade me from taking statins. One paper concluded that statins were the next “opiod crisis”. I can forgive the individual GP who suggested I take statins because a) I did not remember to tell them that I had recently taken steriods — my bad and b) they were new to the practice and clearly on their first rotation out of medical school. Trust is bi-directional.

Your first criteria should be met by any qualified general practitioner. If not then one wonders how they continue in practice. On referral to specialists it maybe that after evaluating your reported symptoms they do not consider referral necessary.

As for your second, QS is not an established/accepted idea yet. I’ve encountered similar suspicion with ME. A situation that is changing rapidly with the rise of long CoVid which presents in similar way.

On your third it is difficult to tell whether your doctor is thinking of prevention or not. Too many symptoms are caused by past beheviours. Obesity being one of the visually obvious. And it has attendant illnesses: type 2 diabetes, CVD, cancers to name but three. Patients need to be willing to change their lifestyles but when they will not the only recourse for the medical profession is to treat symptoms.

I’ll close by saying that my GPs saved my life in 2020 despite all the CoVid-19 precautions. Referred me to non-CoVid specialists despite the height of the pandemic who in addition to those steriods used drugs that cost (the NHS) £5,500/$7,000 a dose and I needed six doses! There were other medications that accompanied those; at the height of my treatment I was taking or injecting/being injected 13 separate drugs on a regular basis.