By Evan Falchuk

Attention doctors:

Your patients are talking about you.

They tell their friends, family and co-workers about you.  They talk about you in public places where people they don’t know might overhear them.  Probably every doctor understands this.  But for some reason, once all this talking starts happening on the internet, some doctors do odd things.  Like trying to get patients to sign “gag orders” before agreeing to treat them.

It’s a mistake, and a missed opportunity.

The Washington Post reports on efforts by some doctors to “quell criticism.”  But in the age of the internet, you simply can’t squash criticism.  Indeed, in trying, doctors risk not only undermining the trust that is necessary for a good relationship with their patient, but they also miss out on an opportunity to improve their practices– and our health care system.

Here’s what I mean.

Jeff Jarvis, blogging pioneer and author of the best-selling book What Would Google Do? thinks your angriest customers are doing you a great favor:

Here’s some free advice: Go to Google (GOOG), enter any of your company’s brands followed by the word “sucks,” and you will see the true consumers’ reports. Brace yourself: It won’t be pretty. Wal-Mart’s (WMT) unofficial Google Sucks Index turns up 165,000 results; Disney’s (DIS) 530,000; Google’s 767,000. What’s your number?

Now don’t get mad at these people. Instead, help them get even with you. These angry customers are doing you a great favor. They care enough about your product or service to tell you exactly what went wrong. Other customers may just desert you and head to the competition. But these are telling you what to fix. Listen to them. Help them. Respond to them. Ask their advice—and they’ll give it to you.

It’s about “co-creating” with your customer, figuring out what is important to them and whether what you’re doing serves that need.  It sounds like the practice of medicine, but it’s also about the very personal and subjective nature of the doctor-patient relationship.

What you want from your doctor is pretty simple- you want the doctor to pay attention to you, think about you, answer your questions, and help you understand your condition. Truthful feedback in these areas can be very hard to come by.  No government agency is going to measure it.  But patients are happy to share their views.

So shouldn’t doctors embrace web sites that give patients the chance to say what they think?

Some doctors don’t think so.

One, Dr. Nancy Falk, told the Washington Post that the “people least capable of judging the quality of care are patients”  (she is wrong about this, by the way).  She also said wishes there were a “Web site where I could complain about patients.”

Now, what do internet commenters have to say about Dr. Falk?  The Post says commenters called her “curt and intolerant of questions.”  Falk denied those descriptions, but her quotes make it sound like maybe there is something to them. Still, other commenters had equally strong positive recommendations.

Could she improve the quality of her relationships with her patients if she asked each one if they thought she was “curt and intolerant of questions,” and really wanted to know their honest answer?  If her practice is like any other business that asks its customers what they think, the answer is yes.  In a world where patients are increasingly encouraged to “shop” for medical care, doctors who don’t do this will lose out.

But there’s an even larger point that these doctors are missing.

Modern doctors are some of the best educated and best trained people the world has ever seen.  But our health care system, which forces them to spend too little time with each patient, systematically undervalues all of the things patients really want.

Doctors should embrace any technology, any system that lets the voice of the patient be spoken more loudly.  Doctors should encourage the collection of all of the stories from patients about how they feel their doctor doesn’t have enough time, or was harried, or curt, or distracted by some insurance or government requirement.  They should take this information and show it to insurers, legislators, the media.  And they should make a simple point: we don’t want to work under these conditions, and our patients don’t want us to, either.

Making our health care system work to serve these purposes is what it means to put patients first.