I don’t have any SANE advise for you on getting a doctor. I take one of two tacts – have an asthma attack in their office or show up pregnant. In both cases some hippocratic oath thing makes them bend over backwards to take me in.

Maybe one of us could, you know break your pinky or something, so they’d feel honour bound to treat you t- hen you’d be on the books?

I got a doctor in a nice formal cooperative 5 minutes after getting here (Wolfville)

I was at the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre before that (LURVE THEM!!!!)

I would tell that overworked, burned out bitch that, after some thinking you decided NOT to take her on as your doctor. lol I cannot fanthom being treated like that, maybe I’m naive but anyone talking to me like that would see me walking out the office and never come back.

And one small nitpick on your comment (sorry, occupational hazard for an editor) but we don’t have socialized medicine in Canada. In socialized medical systems, the doctors work directly for the state. In Canada (and many other countries with universal care), doctors run their own private practices, just like they do in the US. The only difference is that every doctor deals with one insurer, instead of 150. And that insurer is the provincial government, which is accountable to the legislature and the voters if the quality of coverage is allowed to slide.

The proper term for this is “single-payer insurance.”

This is cribbed from a really good article found at http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/mythbusting-canadian-health-care-part-i

Oh, and I would so dump Dr. Cukoo-head. Good luck. If I find a Dr. accepting patients, I’ll email you with the name.

Tiana – Thanks, I’ll give her a call. Dr. Cuckoo Head has a frowny face on the ratings and some unhappy comments.

Jazz – There are private doctors? How does one find them?

CP – See, socialized medicine has it’s drawbacks as well as some benefits.

A&J – Apparantly there’s a “plan”. When pressed, I was told the plan was that once the current crop of med students graduate, we’d have more doctors. I can see a lot of flaws with this plan.

JB- Halifax seems like a long way to go for a check-up. My doctor there was a very nice woman – not much of a doctor, but very nice.

Salted – Thanks for the info. As I mentioned, I visit the CPSO site often. It may say a doctor’s taking patients, but it’s never true – either that or they get full up by the time I call. Some of them tell me they haven’t taken patients for years, yet they’re still shown as YES for accepting new patients. You can get a doctor anywhere – no rules, but it would be nice to have one that didn’t require a major excursion to visit.