Having torn the rotator cuff in my right shoulder in a work-related accident in March of this year…read more(2017), I was advised through the WSIB procedures to find a physical therapy clinic and enter into treatment. I used no more discretion and consideration in choosing a clinic than going to the closest to my home. That was my first mistake.
Upon entering the Apexx clinic, one is immediately impressed by the relaxed, homey feel of the space, which is laid out like a house rather than a cold, antiseptic clinic. The staff are warm and friendly and the atmosphere puts one at ease physically, mentally and emotionally.
I'm writing this review in December 2017. After 2 8-week treatment periods covered by the WSIB and 4 weeks of treatment paid for on my own, my shoulder is insignificantly improved, I am still in a great deal of pain and I have been forced to go to another clinic.
Here's why, and what I wish I had known before ever setting foot in this clinic.
The impressive relaxed setting is deceiving, wherein hidden behind that easiness are many examples of a lack of professionalism. A listing with explanations should suffice to paint a clear and accurate picture.
The clinic opens at 9:30am, and appointments are booked from that time. However, staff routinely wander in casually as late as 10:15, by which time the lineup of patients usually fillls up the waiting area. Because of my work schedule, my only option for appointment times was 9:30am, with a very narrow window left to get to work on time after treatment. Too many times to count, my treatment was delayed by sometimes as long as 20-30 mins, because of the lack of staff.
This leads to the second point. The clinic is seriously understaffed for the amount of patients it has and is consistently overbooked, leading to a whole list of problems. Treatment sessions that should last an hour can take up to 1.5 hrs. You may be forced to wait up to 15 mins between, say, an ultrasound treatment and a massage, because staff are busy running around amongst the too many patients they have and can't take care of all at once. The physiotherapist, Andre Kong, is also the one who runs the clinic, has no dedicated administration staff, and is constantly distracted during treatment, or actually has to interrupt it, to deal with administrative issues; so that I as a patient was rarely getting the proper focus and attention in my treatment.
Because of overbooking and understaffing, oftentimes my treatment session was cut short with the excuse that there simply wasn't any staff to be able to treat me. In my second 8-week treatment period, the massage therapy, which was the most essential part to treating my injury, was rendered to me less than 5 times out of 24 treatment sessions, and never a full massage, usually barely enough time to get started before the massage therapist is taken away by the physiotherapist and sent to work on another patient.
While part of my treatment was to include strength training to build strength in the muscles surrounding the injury, and while the clinic is equipped with free weights and machines, NOT ONCE in all my treatments did I undergo any strength training. The best the physiotherapist could do was to print off a ream of sheets with relevant strengthening exercises on it and telling me to do them at home on my own time.
Because I have better ways to spend the rest of my day, I won't even go into detail about repeated inappropriate advances of a sexual nature by a particular massage therapist during therapy; the preponderance of inexperienced, non-paid community college interns rendering treatment at a clinic where they outnumber the regular staff; the physiotherapist who insists on being addressed as "Doctor" even though he has no professional right to do so, and who, when asked questions related to my injury, routinely seemed more keen on showing off his physiological knowledge with long lectures that may or may not have answered the questions asked; the dog belonging to the physiotherapist's mom, often present in the clinic while patients are being treated; the overt discrimination displayed by the physiotherapist towards intern staffers who were of either Middle Eastern or South Asian descent.
In sum, in addition to my own example of 20 weeks of treatment with very little result, I can offer yet another: attending the clinic during the same time as I, was a car accident patient in a great deal of pain. At the beginning of my treatment, he was arriving at the clinic under his own steam. By the time I left the clinic, he was barely hobbling into the clinic with the assistance of a walker.
CAVEAT EMPTOR!
