When my adopted daughter first came home, we took her to our local pediatrician for a general check-up. He seemed like a nice guy and offered to give us the custom cut carpets for our family room since we had recently bought a house he had lived in a few years ago. When I asked if he didn’t have a use for them, he replied that no, he didn’t; he’d chosen his new house so he wouldn’t have any rooms that small. Kinda insulting, but nothing to what was to come. (I turned down the carpet, btw.)

He then proceeded to run several blood tests on my baby girl. This was SOP since she came from a country in which medical care is often less comprehensive than in the U.S., especially for children who are waiting to be adopted. When the results came back, he told me that she had Hepatitis-C, acquired from her birth mother. This is a sexually transmitted liver disease that is currently incurable, easily transmissible, and that would significantly affect her adult life. I was, understandably, freaked out. His response was that I shouldn’t worry because there would be a vaccine by the time she grew up, so she could have a normal sex life. No discussion of how it would affect her ability to have children, who would be at risk of maternal transmission even if her partner were to receive this purely hypothetical vaccine.

At this same appointment, he refused to prescribe a steroid cream for a bleeding eczema lesion on her arm that was bad enough to cause a significant scar, saying that it was too strong a medication for a seven-month old child.

After many days of worry about the hepatitis, I took her to see a pediatrician in a nearby town—a woman who is extremely careful, very professional, and whom I knew because she was my parents’ neighbor. This pediatrician promptly informed me that it was common knowledge that you can’t test children under 18 months for diseases like Hep-C because they still carry their birth mother’s antibodies and will test positive regardless of their own status. She also prescribed a steroid cream for the eczema and told me to use it sparingly and only for a couple of days.

Within two days, my daughter’s arm was healing well enough to discontinue the cream. She did not get a scar.

We had my daughter tested for Hep-C when she was nineteen months old and it came back negative.

Needless to say, I never returned to the original pediatrician. His lack of basic medical knowledge was scary. We’ve continued to go to the second pediatrician, who has proven a God-send, both for my children and to me when she forced me to get my blood-count done after one of my children was born. She took one look at me and said I’d lost too much blood and threatened to call my parents (who were on vacation out of the country) if I didn’t seek treatment. I did so and learned that my blood count was low enough to put me at risk of a stroke if I didn’t get a transfusion. Really, really grateful for her perceptiveness and stubborn insistence (okay, blackmail—lol!) that I get checked.

As an additional note, I later learned that the inept pediatrician had previously refused to refer my obviously-suffering stepson for evaluation for Autism-Spectrum Disorder—a decision that delayed for years the treatment that later helped him become a fully-functional, delightful, and talented young man and made it significantly harder for him to overcome the challenges of being neuro-non-typical in a neuro-typical-biased world. This doctor also told my sister that one of her sons was a perfectly healthy infant and refused to prescribe a skull-shaping helmet, even though his head was seriously flat on one side. She also switched to the second pediatrician I mentioned and soon learned that her son had a mild form of genetic muscular dystrophy that made him too weak to turn his head and affected his breathing. A shaping helmet corrected his skull deformity and physical therapy helped him breathe and move better. (He eventually outgrew all negative effects of this condition.)

Conclusion: Just because a doctor has a fancy office and is popular, don’t assume he (or she) is a good provider. The bad doctor had expensive furniture and wealthy patients. The really good doctor has a very basic office with beat-up old furniture and a high percentage of her patients are on Medicaid. Yet she’s among the most careful, informative, and caring physicians I’ve encountered. Even if you’re not a medical professional, you can’t be afraid to stand up to a doctor. If something seems off, get a second opinion!