When seeking medical care, sometimes it’s hard for the ordinary person to figure out which practitioner to pick. After all, there are fancy ads, promises of perfection, same day treatment and free initial visits. Who doesn’t love something perfect, immediate, and free?  Here is the difference between a free initial visit versus a standard medical consultation with a specialist.

I like to think of it as thinking about buying a car. As soon as I go to my local car dealership, they aren’t charging me to be there, but they are going to be working hard to sell me one of their cars. It’s already a foregone conclusion that I need to buy a car if I am at the dealership.
But do I really need to buy a car? What if I go to a consultant who analyzes my driving history, habits, future plans, the public transportation options, and the viability, costs and value of the car I already have. Maybe that consultant tells me I don’t need a car, maybe he tells me that a car isn’t my real problem, maybe he tells me my current car is dangerous and I definitely need to replace it and here are the best options, maybe he tells me I will need a car in the future but could wait and save up money first.

A medical consultation by a physician normally means that you are consulting the physician to give you their unbiased medical judgement about your situation, advice on whether you need treatment, and best options for treatment. This kind of appointment takes time and specialty expertise, and is billed to insurance or the patient. You are not paying for a sales pitch, you are paying for expert advice.

A medical consultation should take into consideration the patient’s history, symptoms, physical examination. A few of the questions being evaluated are; is this even a vein problem, or something else entirely? Does the patient have other medical issues that would make it more complicated or inadvisable to treat their veins? Does the patient have the desire, informed consent, and realistic expectations to pursue treatment?

If a physician is working under a business model of offering free initial visits in order to obtain more treatment business, there is more pressure to sell the procedures, and to possibly oversell the results. Anyone promising perfect results can’t really know that they will manage to eliminate every single tiny visible vein.

Patients deserve excellent advice about their health and all of their treatment options. It’s a complex, confusing world out there and physicians need to be trusted advisors to their patients. You deserve it.