Thursday, August 22, 2013
The customer service here is disgusting and the procedures arnt much better! I had 2 procedures done there and each one was worse then the other and never done correctly. They ruined a tooth of mine that can never be fixed. this place should be shut down. plain and simple! DONT GO HERE!!!
This is an actual online review of a dental office that anyone in the known universe with an Internet connection will read when they search for this practice online. If this was your office what would you do?
Before jumping into the problems let’s first acknowledge that online customer reviews can be a great service. The fact is, as a consumer I appreciate others’ opinions regarding various service establishments and have made buying decisions based on these reviews. As a professional I acknowledge that some of my colleagues do not deserve public trust and if they can be identified, and the public can be protected from them, that serves both the public and the profession. If the above review is true, the public deserves to know. But what if it is not true?
Online user reviews have become incredibly powerful. Unfortunately the system as it now stands is deeply flawed, ripe for abuse, inherently corrupt. Professionals, especially dentists, are prime targets with virtually no legal protection. As a dental professional your reputation is golden, it is a large part of the value of your practice. Anything that damages that reputation can have significant financial, professional and even legal consequences.
In the past if you had an unhappy patient, and even good dentists will have unhappy patients, he or she might complain to one person at work or a neighbor. At most a handful of people would hear the rant. Today if they post on Google or Yelp, hundreds of people will see it including every potential new patient who Googles your office to find the phone number and address.
If you are the victim of a false or malicious review can you seek a legal remedy? So far the answer is no, the courts both the legal courts and the court of public opinion have clearly come down on the side of the reviewer and against the dentist. Attempts by dentists to protect themselves with legal intervention have led to disaster.
As reported in the ADA News and elsewhere in 2009 Dr. Yvonne Wong a pediatric dentist filed a defamation lawsuit against a patient’s parents and Yelp. In her opinion the Yelp review was false and defamatory. The first court to rule was the court of public opinion. Do you think the typical person reading about this incident was sympathetic to the dentist? Do you think they thought oh, this poor dentist is being lied about? No, the typical response based on media comments was she must be a horrible dentist if she has to sue her patients not to say bad things about her.
Next the state courts ruled and not only did they dismiss the suit but ordered Dr. Wong to pay Yelp and the parents over $80,000 in court costs and fees.
As disturbing as that is, the sad, sad case of Dr. Stacy Makhnevich is worse.
Dr. Makhnevich, a dentist from New York, contracted with a firm called “Medical Justice” that assured her their contract would protect her from malicious online reviews. Eventually she received what she though was an unfair patient review and attempted to enforce the agreement. However far from forcing the patient to back down he turned around and sued her with the aid of a “public interest” organization the Public Citizen Litigation Group willing to push the matter. Then the media piled on, the story was picked up by over 200 news outlets including MSNBC, CBS, the Washington Post and Yahoo. She was crucified.
Now a year later a story at Ars Technica reports that Dr. Makhenvich has disappeared. Her lawyers have been unable to get in touch with her, she has closed her business, and her lawyers are looking to withdraw from the case.
I have no idea if the patient review was fair or not. I have no idea how good a dentist Dr. Makhenvich is. The negative review had more to do with billing and insurance than with quality of care. I have no idea if she was maligned and lied about. The sad truth is that none of that matters now; she has been driven from the profession by an online review and her attempts to protect herself.
This issue is far from over. There are numerous suits still pending against review sites such as Yelp. One Texas dentist even threatened a patient with criminal charges over a negative review. We need to strike a balance between free speech, providing accurate information to consumers and the right to protect ourselves from false and malicious attacks. The future is coming and it will be amazing!