I hate that I am still so appalled by the poor quality of care I received here that it stands out…read moreas one of the worst, most egregious examples of dismissal and laziness in medicine, even after ten years.
Yes, you read that correctly: ten years.
I came in back at the beginning of May in 2016 after I took a bad tumble off my bicycle in NYC. I had heard a very loud pop, and felt a severe, sudden, searing pain. Now, I have to say this about my pain tolerance: I've broken 6 bones in my body (that I know of so far), and not one of them has hurt when they broke. Getting hit by a truck as a pedestrian does not rank in my top five most painful injuries or ailments. *THIS*, however...this most certainly did, but I knew that it didn't necessarily warrant a trip to an emergency department (I knew I could tolerate the pain for a little bit), which is why I waited until I was back home to seek medical attention.
I was able to make an appointment online and be seen swiftly, which was excellent! The CSRs, medical assistants, and radiology technicians (and the radiologist who read my x-ray!) were fantastic! If I could separate my visit score between the interaction with those employees and the provider, I absolutely would-because those fine folks 100% deserve 5 stars and a significant raise!
The physician who "saw" me, on the other hand, was so incredibly dangerous and incompetent that-when I saw her visit note the next morning at my PCP's office (which I managed to get into first thing somehow), I requested that the physician seeing me that morning RedLine that physician for her conduct, because literally every single thing she charted in her note was a lie.
EVERY. SINGLE. BIT. OF. HER. DOCUMENTED. ASSESSMENT. WAS. A. LIE.
1. She said she physically examined my foot, and that she spent at least 15 minutes with me.
Lie. She stood in the doorway and never fully entered the room, and saw me face to face for maybe 2 minutes tops.
2. She said I had no bruising or swelling, nor pain to palpation, no pain with weight bearing, and I had no problems with passive or active range of motion .
Lies, lies, and more lies! Unless she had developed some sort of superpower that enabled her to look through a pair of running shoes and socks, she saw absofuckinglutely nothing, because she never looked at my foot, which had a very distinct bruising pattern that is a hallmark of a ruptured plantar fascia. My foot was also swollen.
She never once tried touching my foot, but if she had, I would have screeched like a toddler being pulled out of a ball pit. I could barely tolerate socks, let alone a manual exam. No pain with movement or weight bearing? If I didn't have that, I wouldn't be there dealing with her incompetence and laziness. Full range of motion? HAHAHAHA nooope.
What did she do for me in the whole 2 minutes she gazed in my general direction?
She told me that my problem was that I had a heel spur, which was why my foot hurt, so I needed to wear cushy socks and shoes and then she walked away, without ever entering the exam room.
I was mid-sentence, telling her that it was NOT my heel that was hurting, but along the arch and into the ball of my foot as she turned to walk away. She didn't stop, didn't turn around, didn't acknowledge a damn word of what I said.
I get the fact that I came into the clinic there after 5pm; it was evening, people get tired and they want to go home, but seriously? You're going to fabricate a whole visit when you're too lazy to take 5 steps and take a quick look at a foot? That's the kind of shit that misses diagnoses that lead to sentinel events and dead patients.
I could have saved so much time and money if she had done her job properly...hell, if she had done her job AT ALL. What she did was not the practice of medicine. What she did was the human equivalent of genAI, and it sucked.
I don't want anyone to experience the level of dismal care I received here .