What does Full Board Plus mean?

What does 'board certified' mean to an American?

• Board Certified, or certified by a board, in the UK commonly means 'Certified under the Mental Health Act' and committed to a Mental Institution. I was rather surprised to see a MD, Board Certified.

• Answer:

  LOL! Didn't know that. Board Certification in the US is a supposedly voluntary thing in which you go do a couple of exams and get a certificate. You can start doing this only after you've finished residency, which is specialty training, which you do after medical school, to keep our terms clear. In some specialties it may have some significance, in that those without it, those can't pass the exam, are not as good. I don't know if such specialties exist, but it's possible. In other specialties, it's a meaningless piece of paper for which you have to fork over tons and tons of money. In psychiatry the oral exam bears no resemblance to real life and measures one thing and one thing only: your level of exam anxiety. The written exam measures how much you can answer to the party line. Unfortunately, it has come to be forced upon doctors by the system, via hospital accredition. If you don't have this piece of paper you're no good and can no longer work. It expires after 10 years, so if you don't go through a whole torturous and expensive process to renew it, you will find yourself suddenly out of a job. Yesterday you were a fine doctor, today - oops, fired. Renewing costs - you guessed it - lots of money! It's basically a money making machine for the Board members. The boards are private organizations, whose function is to make a good living off of doctors. If you've done it over 30 years ago, you're 'grandfathered in' and don't have to retake it, which clearly shows that it's not about keeping doctors up to date or any such nonsense, but purely about money. I know of doctors who were fired because they were not board certified due to anxiety, or forgot to renew the certificate, and in their place, the hospital hired a nurse practitioner, who might be perfectly fine at the job, but has a lot less training - no medical school, no four years of residency, no fellowship training and no boards! Because such a path does not exist for mid level practitioners. See the absurdity? Bureaucratic thinking at its finest. It tells you nothing about how knowledgable, kind or competent the doctor is. All it shows it that he can pass some stupid exam. The public doesn't understand this, unfortunately. Unless doctors opt out en masse, they will continue to be used and abused by the various parasites who live off their work.