A rating on Dr Stewart appeared on the Canadian based RateMDs.com website on 28 Dec 2014.
If it is to treated as genuine, the lady providing the rating seems to have suffered the extremely bad luck of suffering from a rectocele for 5-6 years while under treatment from Dr Stewart and an unnamed GP, both of whom didn’t appear to understand how her rectocele could have been treated properly.
You would think that in an ideal world the GP she saw would have known exactly the right person or persons in Sydney to refer her to for treatment, which he or she obviously didn’t, or that Dr Stewart would have said something like, “Look, there are surgeons in Sydney who know more about rectoceles than I do – here’s the names of 2 or 3,” which didn’t happen.
Not only did Dr Stewart not say anything like that, it is claimed that he reported back to the GP, this lady, “has very unrealistic expectations as to how much surgery can achieve in fixing all of her symptoms. I think she is also unrealistic as to how easy surgery may be and how good her recovery may be,” which the GP appears to have accepted – it comes over as a case of the blind leading the blind.
The fact is that we, in NSW at least, have an indescribably primitive system in which it seems patients are expected to go from doctor to doctor with very little to protect them from falling into the hands of ones who not only aren’t helpful but who have the arrogance, the impertinence, to say that they have “very unrealistic expectations,” when their expectations are more than reasonable.
The RateMDs website is as good as any we know for patients to report their experiences with various doctors, even though it’s based in Canada, but with it, there has been a recent change which we think is very bad – previously doctors were able to respond on it to ratings on them, but this is not longer possible. So yesterday we emailed Dr Stewart asking him if he wanted to comment on this rating. We’ll let you know if he responds.
Of course, we’d love to know the latest from the lady who provided the rating referred to, but contacting her is also one of the things that’s not possible with RateMDs.