Best Sydney Doctors

This morning, I sent Dr Haber an email starting with:-

It was one in a series of emails he and I swapped, initiated by Dr Haber, which you can view by using this link.

I concluded with this:-

Dr Haber hasn’t been practicing as a doctor for at least two years, it would appear, (although you would never know it from going to the the website of the Newtown Medical Practice where he used to practice,) but I have thought it worthwhile to put up this post so my readers can see the type of doctor you can end up with in NSW if you don’t do your “homework”.

I’ve written quite a lot before on my extraordinary experience with Mr Gavin Boneham, Optometrist.

One of the most remarkable aspects of it is that having quoted me $468 for a single bifocal contact lens, (I really needed two, but I thought I would try him with one, in view of the number of sleazy optometrists I’d come up against before – just as well!) Mr Boneham subsequently announced, to my great surprise, something he hadn’t mentioned before – that before I could pick up the lens I would have to pay him another $180 to have the lens “checked”. (I asked his staff if I could just pick it up, but was told I couldn’t.) It would be hard to imagine more scurrilous and mischievous deceptiveness in a so-called professional.

There were three problems about this.

Firstly, all that could be done in this $180 “checking” was to check, (1) the long vision, (2) the short vision, and, (3) the fit, each of which took more than 3 minutes. It took considerable gall for Mr Boneham to charge me $180 for something that could have been done in ten minutes, although he strung it out a bit, but Mr Boneham had more than enough gall to handle this situation.

Secondly, such contact lenses can’t be checked properly unless they have been worn for at least 2 hours, which he would have known, in fact he confirmed it in one of his emails – but this didn’t stop this extraordinary man from going ahead with pretending that he could check the one he had made for me, as soon as it was put in to my eye, if it meant he could charge me another $180.

Thirdly, he got two out of the three things he supposedly checked wrong anyway – the short vision and the fit were so bad that he gave me my money back.

That none of these things worried the Health Care Complaints Commission when I made a complaint to it about these things tells you all you would want to know about that organisation – it’s completely and utterly useless.

And, of course, as far as the Optometry Council of NSW  was/is concerned about any of this, in particular it’s President, Associate Professor David Pye, and it’s Deputy President, Dr Philip Anderton, they think that’s everything’s fine about this – clearly they don’t have they slightest interest in the welfare of optometrist’s patients, just in the welfare of optometrists.

And does the Minister of Health, Jillian Skinner, or the Director General of NSW Health, Mary Foley, care about any of these things? Of course not! Perhaps they might say that there are more important things for them to worry about, but you would think that there was one or two people in the NSW bureaucracy whose job it was to be concerned about these things – but I’ve never got the slightest indication that there are.

One of the things that adds to the intrigue about this email I got, apparently from Dr Brodski, on 29 Mar 2013, is that it concludes with:-

Dr Brodski’s qualifications have been added, which wasn’t done with the first two emails I got, which concluded simply with “Dr Brodski” or “Dr Vladimir Brodski” without any qualifications added??? So if the third email did in fact come from Dr Brodski – who comes over as an extremely humble man – why is he suddenly adding credentials???

But there’ something even more suspicious! All the Google searches in the world – and such searches are usually very good – won’t come up with anything sensible as to what “MSCCA” stands for as a medical qualification. If there’s a letter wrong in this, then clearly the third email didn’t come from Dr Brodski – doctor’s don’t get the letters in their qualifications wrong!

Then who did it come from? Clearly it’s about trying to get a better look for Primary Health Care Limited. I’m afraid many will have the gravest suspicions about Primary’s possible part in all this.

Dr Ho of Suite 204/66 Berry Street, North Sydney, 8901 0684, has one horrible rating on the RateMDs.com website. I rang his surgery to see if he had an email address for his patients, expecting to speak to a receptionist who would tell me yes or no – suspecting it would be no.

Instead Dr Ho himself answered the phone – he wouldn’t give me his email address, if he has one, and came over as bad in every way as his rating suggests, if not worse.

I’m absolutely astounded that when the Dr Hos of this world are given the chance to tell their side of the story on bad ratings, as I try to give them, almost invariably they make things worse, and, if anything, seem to make it more likely that the bad ratings on them are genuine. And it always seems that if you happen to get to speak with them personally, as happened for me this morning with Dr Ho, and politely ask the simple question, “Do you have an email address for your patients?” they’re incredibly rude and objectionable, as though they are in a position of strength, which they may be with their patients, but they’re not with me – something they’re too dumb to realise.

A dentist first registered in 1986, (according to the AHPRA website,) still answering his own phone? Hmmmm.

Hopefully, there are dentists around with not so many bad things about them.

Yesterday this article appeared in The Telegraph. Since it’s opening sentence starts off with, “Half a million Australians are harbouring a silent killer that could cause a heart attack or stroke“, and goes on to talk about high blood pressure, it’s obviously meant to be a serious piece – yet, in lots of ways I think it’s quite bizarre.

In saying this, I write as someone who has no formal medical qualifications, but as someone in his 70s that has been under the care of a heart specialist for nearly four years, mainly because of high blood pressure, who suspects that the article was written by a younger journalist with no personal experience of high blood pressure.

I first saw my heart specialist on 5 June 2009, when my blood pressure was 166.

What I should have been told was:-

(1) You have a blood pressure problem. (Anyone with blood pressure over 130 has a blood pressure problem.)

(2) Get yourself a blood pressure machine so you can check your blood pressure yourself as it changes 100 times a day.

(3) Take the right medication to keep your blood pressure below 130, perhaps as low as 120 – you can work on lifestyle and diet issues as well, but the good news is that the right medication will do the job anyway.

(4) You’ll have to experiment a bit to find the medication that’s right for you, and you’ll have to take it perhaps 4 or 5 times a day as there is no such thing as medication that lasts 24 hours.

This is where I’m at nearly four years later – as far as I’m concerned, this is where I should have been within a week of 5 Jun 2009! And reviewing what I was told, I’m so angry that I wasn’t – I didn’t buy my own blood pressure machine for nearly 18 months, on 2 Dec 2011, and not even then because my heart specialist recommended it!!!???

There are the parts of the article I find bizarre.

“While on in three Australians have been told by a doctor they have high blood pressure – one in eight don’t actually know what their blood pressure is“. Nobody know what their blood pressure is !!! – it changes 100 times a day. Blood pressure is a very inexact science. You can check your blood pressure 7 times in a row and it will be different every time, often varying over a range of 15. I feel doctors are often to blame here – they check your blood pressure once and give you the impression that that’s what it is, when it’s not. Five minutes later it can be quite different. You can only work on general patterns. I’ve never had a doctor tell me that – I’ve only learnt it from having my own blood pressure machine.

“The only way to find out if you have high blood pressure is to ask your GP for a regular check-up”, says Heart Foundation chief Dr Lyn Roberts. Sure, as you get older, GPs usually check you blood pressure as a matter of routine, without you asking, and thats the way in which you may be first made aware that you have a problem, but the moment you are told it’s over 130 get your own blood pressure machine, and THAT’S the way in which you will find out if you have high blood pressure.

(My blood pressure machine, which is an Omron – which seems to be the best brand, although I don’t really know – cost me $156. I have a doctor friend, also in his 70s, who has an Omron which is like a big watch that he wears on his wrist 24/7 to tell him what his blood pressure is, day and night, and he told me recently that he knows someone who wears a similar machine that is constantly signalling his blood pressure to his smart phone!)

“It’s recommended that everyone over 45 and people of all ages with other risk factors for heart disease, such as being overweight, smoking or a family history, get their blood pressure checked every one to two years.” I would have thought this was madness – such people should get a reading from a doctor at least every 6 months, and as I say, the moment you get a reading over 130, get you own machine.

“Although there is no firm rule about what defines high blood pressure most people should aim for a reading of less than 120/80″. My understanding is that this is wrong – it should be kept below 130, perhaps down to 120 or a little bit less, but you should be aiming to keep it under 120.

When I saw my heart specialist some 12 months after I first saw him, he told me that my heart had deteriorated somewhat over the last 12 months, so he would like to change my medication to keep my pressure under 130 – the implication being that during those 12 months, when I had no idea what my pressure was, it had been over 130, which had caused a deterioration in my heart, which makes me SO angry.

On the issue of when you should take your medication, a doctor told me years ago that there is no such thing as medication that lasts 24 hours, yet for marketing or other reasons – perhaps they think they’ll never get their patients to take it more than once a day – doctors try and make out that there is. With your own machine, you will soon learn how often you have to take it, what pills you have to cut into pieces to make sure your pressure doesn’t go too high or two low. As I say, I’ve found, by trial and error, that I have to take it 4 or 5 times a day. (By the way, if anyone is aware of medication that DOES last for 24 hours, PLEASE let me know.)

In summary, I suppose what I’m saying is this – with the aid of a blood pressure machine, get yourself into a daily routine where you keep your pressure below 130 and, say, above 115. After you have taken the first lot of medication, you will get to know by trial and error how long it is before you have to take another lot – it may be 6 or 9 or 12 or 15 hours or more, depending on how serious your problem is. But my understanding is that if you let it be above 130 on any consistent basis you could end up being told your heart has deteriorated, as I was. To me, it’s a small price to pay to minimise problems with your heart – I wish there was something as easy to minimise problems with cancer.

RateMDs is an organisation based in Toronto, Canada, that publishes ratings provided by  members of the public on doctors and dentists in Sydney and many other places around the world on it’s website. When I first became aware of it two or three years ago, about 8 new ratings a month were appearing on it’s website in relation to Sydney doctors and dentists – in the last month, March 2013, it was 38.

When one has a bad experience with a doctor or a dentist one often has an interest in two things – (1) mainly letting your family and friends and others know about that bad experience and, (2) perhaps seeing the doctor or dentist concerned disciplined in some way. The RateMDs.com website, while doing nothing about the second of these, presents a powerful new way of doing the first.

In NSW we have the Health Care Complaints Commission which supposedly handles complaints about Sydney doctors and dentists. It, of course, really does nothing about the first and virtually nothing about the second. That is unless, of course, you count 1 media release on every 120 or so complaints about doctors it receives, and the 1 on every 300 complaints or so it receives about dentists – with the rest nobody finds out anything about anything about the complaints you and I might make.

Websites like the RateMDs.com websites are changing this.

Of course the existing system suits the doctors and dentists – I’m sure some of them even get pleasant surprises at how much they can get away with.

(I have written about how I personally made a complaint about the optometrist Gavin Boneham, how he made a contact lens for me that was so short of what it should have been that he gave me my money back, at least most of it. When asked to comment on this by the HCCC, Mr Boneham advised them that I had happened to be sifting through some old lenses I had, and, to my surprise and his, I had found one that more or less suited my purposes – complete fiction, of course – and that was why he’d given me my money back. As he wrote this, he must have been thinking, “I probably won’t get away with this”, – but with the good old HCCC, he did.)

With Barry O’Farrell, Jillian Skinner and Mary Foley, I’m sure all they want to do is be able to say, “See what a great health system we’ve got – hardly anyone complains”, and it’s easier to reduce the complaints by doing a shocking job of handling the complaints they receive, than by addressing the problems that the complaints highlight. I’m sure that if the HCCC did a half decent job they’d be shocked at how may complaints were made. In the meantime, I’m astonished at how many complaints are made when it’s almost invariably a complete waste of time

At least now, we have websites like the RateMDs.com website so we can let others know of our experiences.

By the way, the ratings on doctors and dentists that appear on the RateMDs.com website are not all bad – in fact the opposite. Out of the 38 ratings on new doctors that appeared  in March, 2013, 25 were 10 out of 10 ratings, only 8 were 2 out of 10 ratings, (0 out of 10 ratings aren’t allowed).

Of course there are problems with websites like the RateMDs.com website, which I fully acknowledge, but not the problems we have to put up with due to the total incompetence of Barry O’Farrell, Jillian Skinner and Mary Foley in relation to these matters.

I sent these 3 emails to Dr Mak on 26 Mar, 3 Apr and this morning.

No response!

There’s this supposed defence of Dr Mak on the RateMDs.com website:-

I think an alternative view to that expressed in the last sentence of this is that for the treatment, (or non-treatment,) of a patient in a hospital by someone who’s been a doctor for 13 years to trigger a peer review is disgraceful.

Dr Mak is not now listed as one of the specialists treating patients in the Gosford Private Hospital. I could ask him about this, but I don’t think he’d reply.

If I do ever get any more responses from Dr Mak, I’ll let you know.

Yesterday morning I got one of the most ignorant abusive threatening phone calls I’ve ever got in my whole life from somone who claimed to be Dr Licenblat.

At one stage he bellowed, “Do you undertand!!!???”. And while I was being taken aback, wondering how to respond – I’m not that quick on my feet - he bellowed again, “Do you undertand!!!???” for a more theatrical effect, as though I was a naughty school boy and he was the headmaster. In the end I just had to hang up on him.

This was followed up with a highly threatening email from him.

Later, in the emails we swapped, which you can see by using this link, he said, “I’m sorry that you felt that I was stern with you this morning”. I’d already said to him:-

I have to say that as I was on the end of his barrage various words came to mind – rude, ignorant, intimidating, pompous, arrogant, abusive, childish – but “stern” wan’t one of them!

What was concerning Dr Licenblat was an issue I had sought to describe in my first post on him, and that was that in a rating on him on the RateMDs.com website by I person I will call “Patient XX’, a 10 out of 10 rating that was meant to be very complimentary about him, it had been said, “all the work I had done was on MAJOR cavities that the last dentist never identified“, and that is seemed to me that unless my readers believed two big things, (1) that Patient XX’s last dentist had failed to identify cavities even though they were “MAJOR”, (perhaps something that wasn’t very likely,) and (2) that it wasn’t Dr Licenblat that told Patient XX that he had “MAJOR” cavities, (again something that perhaps wasn’t very likely,) then they well may have come to the conclusion that Patient XX had come to believe he had “MAJOR” cavities, when they didn’t have them, and that it was Dr Licenblat who had convinced him of that – a major credibility problem for Dr Licenblat I would have thought .

I tried to put this to Dr Licenblat in an email to him yesterday by saying:-

You can see his reply in the emails we swapped yesterday, (I always try to give people the opportunity to tell their side of the story – modern technology makes that possible,) – basically it’s, “I haven’t got a credibility problem!!!???”

As far as I’m concerned, he’s just treating people as fools again – me and Patient XX.

To me it’s hard to know where to begin with all the problems in what he says.

Example 1: It’s crystal clear that Patient XX believed that Dr Licenblat had done “all the work”, (sounds like a lot of work,) on “MAJOR cavities” that his or her last dentist failed to identify – why does Dr Licenblat not refer to what Patient XX describes as “MAJOR cavities” as MAJOR cavities? We all know what a cavity is – it’s a hole in a tooth that dentists locate by poking around with a pointy thing, I’ve experienced it myself hundreds of times. You don’t need what Dr Licenblat calls “radiographs” to identify “MAJOR cavities”. Yet Dr Licenblat keeps referring to them as “various lesions” that a specialist dentist had picked up with a radiograph!!!??? Does Dr Licenblat hope to make out that Patient  XX is some sort of fool for thinking he had “MAJOR cavities” that any old dentist should have been able to identify? Is Dr Licenblat trying to befuddle me and my readers with some sort of dentistry gobbledegook?

Example 2: Medical specialists don’t refer patients to GPs – I’ve just checked this with a doctor. Medical specialists rely on GPs to refer patients to them, and it would be the height of stupidity for a specialist, having had a patient referred to them by one GP to refer that patient back to another GP if something arose that was outside his specialty – it just doesn’t happen. And presumably it would work the same way with dentists. Yet Dr Licenblat expects us to believe that a specialist dentist – an Endodontist – referred a patient to him – a dentist GP!!!???, (according to AHPRA’s website.) Note: Neither Dr Licenblat nor Patient XX suggest at any stage that Patient XX had been referred by Dr Licenblat to the Endodontist in the first place.

I reiterate – I think that Patient XX saying in his rating that, “all the work I had done was on MAJOR cavities that the last dentist never identified” raises significant credibility problems for Dr Licenblat. Having said this, those who may be considering consulting him may feel that what he’s said so far and what he may say in the future addresses these problems to their satisfaction.

Just some comic relief to finish. In another example of Dr Licenblat treating me as an fool, he thundered in one of his emails, ”READ THE FULL BLOG, (the capital letters are his and he means “rating”,) referred from an Endodontist”. Unfortunately, this is a big big error – he hasn’t read the full rating himself because it says, “recommended by an Endodontist”, something very very different.

In the course of authoring this blog and it’s related website, I end up with some strange exchanges with people – none, I would think, more strange than this one with Mr Kokkinakis.

Responding to the posts on him I have put up, he emailed me recently saying, amongst other things, “I will also consider reporting you to the police for using a carriage service provider to menace, harass and cause offense. Maybe some time in the slammer will teach you some good and hopefully you will be rehabilitated“.

I replied with, “In terms of my experience in the law – 7 years as a law student, 4 of them full time, and as a NSW solicitor for more than 30 years – and a recent experience in which I had discussions with the police about 4 lengthy vile offensive letters I had received, you may have difficulty finding anyone in the NSW Police Force who doesn’t think you’re an idiot.”