My life has changed in a lot of ways since I started editing this magazine. For one thing, I now have a lawn service and an automatic garage door. For another, I’ve learned the virtues of The Good Book. No, not that one: I’m talking about the Zagat Survey!

It’s an indispensable guide to finding decent restaurants, especially during conference-travel season. Also, it’s fun to peruse listings for restaurants in cities I’ve never been to and/or have little interest in visiting. In order to keep from offending any of you, I’ll refrain from mentioning any of those places.

With their deceptively simple numerical ratings, prose reviews that feature more cut-up and decontextualization than mid-career William Burroughs*, and reliance on an army of local consumers, the Zagat guides have revolutionized how people choose to spend their money on food, drinks, spas and shopping. Maybe that’s not up there with curing cancer, but it’s an accomplishment.

Now the Zagat people are turning their attention to healthcare. Recently, the company announced a partnership with health benefits provider WellPoint to conduct a consumer-based survey of physicians. The companies will ask one million Wellpoint members to rate doctors based on certain parameters.

Mass-grading doctors isn’t a new idea; insurance companies keep private databases of this sort of info, and New York Magazine has been running an annual Best Doctors feature for a decade. This year’s edition covers “The Top 1,439 Doctors.” (I would be crushed if I found out that I came in 1,440th.) But that listing comes from a peer-review survey, not a consumer-driven one.

I think part of the drive to conduct a consumer-based survey like this one can be chalked up to the Wisdom of Crowds crowd, who contend that groups contain more information than individual experts, and thus can reach better conclusions in aggregate.

Or, as Nina Zagat, co-founder and co-chair of Zagat Survey, explained it in the partnership announcement, “Our surveys put consumers in touch with the people they trust the most — other consumers. With this tool, Well-Point is helping to give consumers the power to make smart decisions about selecting doctors based on other people’s experiences.” (Given the number of delicious but artery-busting meals that are served Zagat-recommended restaurants, I hope they’ll be grading cardiac doctors on a curve.)

I have two problems with this approach. My first is with the categories that the survey covers: trust, communication, availability, and environment. (I’m disappointed that “decor” isn’t one of the categories, but there’s always next year.)

I don’t think those categories necessarily indicate how good a doctor is, at least not as well as food, decor and service (along with cost) describe a coherent set of parameters for judging a restaurant.

I hate to hearken back to our previous president this way, but people have very different definitions for terms like “trust” and “communication.” And when those words are used in reference to a subject in which the average American is pretty uneducated, like healthcare, that ambiguity just gets worse.

So I’m sure this guide will make for good marketing, but it seems to me that letting consumers focus on “soft” factors means that the hard stuff — the real patient-outcome stuff — will get ignored.

Which brings me to my second complaint: I just don’t trust other consumers all that much. After all, ‘other consumers’ were responsible for massive success of The Da Vinci Code, Transformers, and Fergie. Those certainly weren’t smart decisions; now I’m supposed to follow what they think of a doctor’s communication skills or trustworthiness?

Gil Roth has been the editor of Contract Pharma since its inception in 1999.