Recently we heard of someone who had this experience. He emailed a doctor with a question at 1.17 pm, got an email back saying “We have received your email and will respond shortly” immediately, (i.e. at 1.17 pm,) and got a highly satisfactory full reply, (admittedly to a pretty straightforward question,) back at 5.04 pm, less than 4 hours later – all on a Sunday! His name was Dr Ron Bezic, cosmetic surgeon.
With other doctors, you can send them 10 emails and they won’t even acknowledge them, let alone reply to them – Dr Eddy Dona, cosmetic surgeon and Dr Andrew Brooks, urologist come to mind.
So who would you sooner consult and use, especially if you have any problems arising out any advice and treatment they give you? – the Ron Bezics or the Eddy Donas or the Andrew Brooks of this world?
Our advice, our very strong advice, is that you send an email to a doctor BEFORE you consult or use them – in this way you will learn what sort of person you might be dealing with, much more than you will from their websites, their ratings, their advertising and so on. (Of course, if they haven’t got an ordinary email address readily available, of if they don’t even acknowledge you emails, don’t even consider consulting or using them.) To a certain extent it doesn’t matter what’s in your email – (1) setting out what you need help with, and asking them if helping people with these symptoms is within their areas of expertise, and, (2) asking them what you would have to do to get copies of your health records if you became one of their patients are two of our favourites. And if you’re too lazy to do this, you deserve all the disastrous things that could happen to you – like having your heart stop while you’re having breast augmentation surgery as happened in the last month or so in Dr Eddy Dona’s Parramatta Cosmetic Clinic.