For many years now, it’s been our philosophy – “If you want something done properly find someone who’s been doing it for 15 years until they’re almost sick of it.” And of course the corollary to this is – “If you want advice from someone find someone who’s been working in the area for 15 years until they’re almost sick of it.”
So when one of our readers wrote to us asking, “What can cause discoloration of the skin?” we thought we’d email letters out to Sydney dermatologists to see if we could locate any people like that for the benefit of this particular reader, other readers, and our families and friends and ourselves
So far we’ve checked out 71 dermatologists or dermatologist firms. 52 of them didn’t have an ordinary email address – some of them had no way of contacting them, apart, obviously from “snail mail” letters, others just had email forms or fax numbers. Quite apart from the fact that it’s much more work to contact those without ordinary email addresses, we’ve always found that they are very much less likely to respond than those who do.
We sent letters to the 19 dermatologists and dermatologist firms that had ordinary email addresses. They asked two questions – “Is helping people with the skin discolouration problem one of the areas in which you specialise?” and, “If not, is there anyone else you can recommend?” They could have been answered with one or two words, unless they wanted to provide details of anyone else.
A reply we got back from a firm saying, “We have four Dermatologists at our practice that could help you with this condition,” is the closest to what we had in mind.
11 haven’t even acknowledged our emails.
The email addresses were not working for 2 of them.
1 claimed to be an expert on everything, a universal genius!
1 said she was overseas unit 18 Jul, and we could email her again if she didn’t reply.
4 tried to hassle us into having a consultation, at $225-240, (with $72.75 back from Medicare if we went to the extra trouble to visit a GP and get a referral,) without answering our questions in any way.
So much for our efforts in seeking to locate specialists in “discolouration of the skin,”
We’ll keep working!