After having a nightmare experience at Anders's "well baby check-up" when he was three days old, I thought I might never go to the doctor again. Then I learned about osteopaths.
Osteopaths attend traditional medical school and get an additional naturopathic degree on top of the standard allopathic medical degree. Osteopaths generally have a specialty, so if you can find an osteopath pediatrician or osteopath family practice doctor, that is ideal. There aren't many of this type of doctor; I think there are two or three in the entire Los Angeles County.
My experience with the osteopath that I found has been nothing but positive.
I also highly recommend the book How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor. My grandfather, a doctor, gave this book to me when I was pregnant, and I read it cover to cover. It made me a lot more confident in my ability as a mom to know when to worry and when not to.
A reader tried to post the following comment to this post but couldn't so emailed me instead. This is what Bob has to say:
You can identify osteopaths because they have DO after their name rather than MD. They are a small fraction of physicians overall but a larger fraction of those in family practice and of young doctors still accepting new patients. They are a growing fraction due to a shortage of doctors. In my experience, and that of my nurse sister, they tend to be more open to alternative medicine. They also have some measure of humility. OTOH, my sense is that many of them did not attend a college of osteopathy because they were committed osteopaths but rather because they did not get into a top medical school. My current MD is much more up on all the latest in conventional medicine, but is also sometimes impatient and bossy. But I would prefer him if I had some complex problem to diagnose. He seems way smarter than the DOs, but with that comes some arrogance. All other things being equal, I might prefer a DO for routine care and an MD for anything complicated.
