Say you're new in town and looking for a general practitioner. Someone, perhaps a co-worker or your health plan handbook, has given you the name of Dr. Ronald Sockolov, who's been practicing in Sacramento since the early 1980s.

So, being the Web-savvy and proactive patient you are, you fire up the search engine and Google the doc.

Up pop a bevy of Web sites with names such as rateMDs.com, vitals.com, drscore.com, healthgrades.com. Heck, even Angie's List, the ubiquitous consumer rating service, has started reviewing doctors alongside plumbers and painters.

Hundreds of physicians in the Sacramento area, from plastic surgeons to ob/gyns, are having their practices and personalities evaluated by a handful of doctor-rating Web sites that have launched in the past few years. Consumers make the calls at these sites.

By clicking on rateMDs.com, for instance, you'll find a bevy of real-life anecdotes that will help you determine whether Sockolov is the doctor for you. Patient comments range from "professional, courteous and knowledgeable" to "totally uninterested and didn't answer my questions."

Depending on the posting, Sockolov is praised for "quickly giving patients referrals" or criticized for a "reluctance to order MRIs and prescribe pain medicine."

Overall, rateMDs.com gave Sockolov a 3.2 rating (5 being the best). Want a second opinion? Over at vitals.com, Sockolov was awarded a 2.1 (4 being the best) for bedside manner and 2.6 for accurate diagnosis.

Anonymous comments sting

Naturally – this being the Internet – all the comments were anonymous.

"People want to vent, I guess, and that's how they do it," says Sockolov, who took the praise and the criticism with equanimity. "I'd prefer they come in here to my office and vent.

"Unless there's some constructive criticism on these sites, I'd hope my patients would feel comfortable talking to me – or even sending me an anonymous note directly. But if you're really unhappy, then by all means find another doctor."

The Web sites are empowering patients who have long felt their voices went unheard and their responses unheeded by health care providers. Maybe by holding doctors accountable for things such as wait times and willingness to answer questions, better customer service will result.

But the comments are anathema to many physicians, who feel the sites' willingness to accept anonymous responses breeds negativity and leads to vindictive, unfair postings that can seriously hurt a practice.

If it's any solace to physicians, a 2008 Harris Interactive poll found that, although 80 percent of adults use the Internet for medical information, only 2 percent of those surveyed say they have changed doctors based on information from a rating site. Some 22 percent of respondents say they have logged on to the rating sites.

American Medical Association president Nancy H. Nielsen, acknowledging that the patient-physician relationship can be fraught, says anonymous postings have many pitfalls.

"Choosing a physician is more complicated than choosing a good restaurant, and patients owe it to themselves to use the best available resources when making important decisions," Nielsen says. "Online opinions of physicians should be taken with a grain of salt and should certainly not be a patient's sole source of information."

Most complaints are about service

Sunnyvale businessman John Swapceinski, who launched rateMDs.com in 2004, says state databases simply don't tell patients what they really want to know about a doctor.

"When it comes down to it, most complaints about doctors are customer service-related and communication issues," he says. "Listen, anything that people spend money on needs to have transparency and be open to criticism."

Proof of the need for doctor ratings, Swapceinski says, comes from the traffic on his site: 450,000 visitors a month and more than 600 fresh postings daily.

Not all the sites are as candid and vitriolic as rateMDs.com. Scott Shapiro, spokesman for healthgrades.com, says users are allowed only to rank a doctor numerically. "We don't allow patients to write a treatise about their issues," he says.

Call The Bee's Sam McManis, (916) 321-1145.