Want to find your “Dr. Right”? Now, you can! You can meet your next doctor on a “speed date.”

Dne Texas hospital is trying its hand at a method once left to the dating world and to ads in in-flight magazines like “It’s Just Lunch”.

Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital outside Fort Worth has created Doc Shop as a way for prospective patients to meet with docs before committing to being a patient, says CNN. It’s a way, they say, to see whether patients and doctors click before signing on to that first appointment. How efficient!

According to AMA and AHA, says CNN, Doc Shop is one of a kind. Could it catch on? Maybe.

But should it? Not a chance. From a patient perspective, one could argue that it saves them from wasting all those hours on initial visits only to find out that doctors don’t know the current literature or aren’t “their type”. Of course, Doc Shop won’t tell prospective patients how long the wait in the waiting room is at their office, how good or bad the office staff is, or anything else about the practice. And it certainly tells patients nothing about the quality of the physicians charming them across the table.

Even more so, anyone can put on a good face for a minute or two and hide their uglier side. Doc Shop is a totally contrived situation where doctors are selling themselves just a few minutes at a time. They are not under the pressures of daily medical practice–their pager isn’t going off, they don’t have a call from an angry patient on line one and an even angrier insurance company on line two.

While Doc Shop may seem like a good idea to frustrated patients who can’t find a good doctor, I don’t think that they are any more likely to find their dream physician any more than someone is likely to find the love of their life from speed-dating around a room of men or women eager to sell themselves off to any one who would have them.

I say if you need a good doctor, ask a friend.

Summer Johnson, PhD