It's difficult to know. It only takes one complete horror story to drive a lot of patients away, and the person telling the horror story may not necessarily know what he's talking about.
At least when I read hotel reviews on tripadvisor I know enough to tell when the one-star reviews are based on real complaints ("Cockroaches all over the room") or excessively picky customers ("Desk clerk rolled his eyes the third time I requested to be shifted to a room with a better view").
But if I read "Doctor Smith botched my surgery, and I lost both my legs" I'm at a loss. Did Doctor Smith really botch the surgery? Or did Doctor Smith's heroic and brilliant surgical intervention just manage save the life of a patient who otherwise would have died? I don't know, and the patient really doesn't know either.
If I knew more about medicine I'd probably have a more realistic example than that, but the fact is that some patients always wind up with outcomes from their medical treatment which are worse than they expected, and they're usually pretty ignorant about to what extent the blame lies with "crappy doctor" vs "crappy luck".
Good point - a doctor who performs only layup procedures is probably going to have a much better track record in their reviews than someone who tackles the challenging ones all the time.
Normalizing reviews is extremely hard, so it's a bit worrying to think about what online reviews might do to doctors' willingness to take on challenging cases.
At least when I read hotel reviews on tripadvisor I know enough to tell when the one-star reviews are based on real complaints ("Cockroaches all over the room") or excessively picky customers ("Desk clerk rolled his eyes the third time I requested to be shifted to a room with a better view").
But if I read "Doctor Smith botched my surgery, and I lost both my legs" I'm at a loss. Did Doctor Smith really botch the surgery? Or did Doctor Smith's heroic and brilliant surgical intervention just manage save the life of a patient who otherwise would have died? I don't know, and the patient really doesn't know either.
If I knew more about medicine I'd probably have a more realistic example than that, but the fact is that some patients always wind up with outcomes from their medical treatment which are worse than they expected, and they're usually pretty ignorant about to what extent the blame lies with "crappy doctor" vs "crappy luck".