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Doctors To Patients: First, Do No Yelp Harm
theodp writes "When he walked into the dentist's office, Ars Technica's Timothy B. Lee was looking for cleaner teeth, but was shown the door after expressing outrage at being asked to first sign a 'mutual privacy agreement' calling for him to transfer ownership of any public commentary he might write in the future about his experience to the good doctor. Lee reports that similar censorious copyright agreements are popping up in doctors' offices across the country. 'Doctors and dentists are understandably worried about damage to their reputations from negative reviews,' writes Lee, but 'censoring patients is the wrong way for doctors to deal with online criticism.'"
Have these dentists never heard of the Streisand Effect? If anyone asked me to sign one of these I'd go right on Yelp and report it. Then everyone would know the professional in question has something to hide.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If I get bad enough service anywhere, I will post a review somewhere. Mostly products and restaurants, but I've done it for a doctor that gave me an appointment 3 months out and then was hours late.
I almost never do this with my real name. It can be my pseudonymous yelp, google, etc. account. No doctor would be able to know that some nick is my real name. Unless they want to get a subpoena for every negative review (actually I can see some asshole doctors doing this) there is no way to enforce this policy.
Man, you really need that seminar!
There is absolutely no 100% safe and effective medicinal treatment for anything. No matter what it is, there is both the possibility it might not work, might have a side effect, or what not. To claim that any medical treatment is 100% safe and effective proves that you are just shilling.
While I don't agree with such contracts, I really can understand why doctors would want to use them.
Back in the day (5-10 years ago), most doctor reviews were tempered by face-to-face interaction. "Hey Bill, how's your dentist?" -- "He's alright. Just ask to get gassed and all dentists are good, am I right?"
But come the internet with pseudonymity (or at least obscurity), people have deemed themselves connoisseurs of consumption-- veritable professional critics of the utterly mundane.
Yelp houses an asinine number of these people who will judge an entire business (small, large, chain, etc.) on single experiences. Their words will be filled with praise or disdain. Hate or Love. They photograph EVERYTHING, photograph and compare perfect omelets, critique the crispness of lettuce in salads, comfort of chairs in waiting rooms, and even banter of workers.
They scrutinize everything mundane because the quality of service and products are so similar, there's NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT otherwise. They polarize their opinions with "Avoid this place!!!" and "YOU MUST TRY THIS PLACE OUT!" and given the following on sites like Yelp, it actually affects business.
And it's not as though histories of reviews can be wiped. I know of one small bike shop that was, understandably, railed for its elitist attitudes towards budget bikes. When new management came in (bike hippy instead of Lycra-rider), the Bike Shop itself changed, but it still had to fight 3 years of bad reviews on Yelp.
I really don't blame doctors for attempting this route. There are better ways to go about it, though.
What are they thinking? The doctors aren't thinking outside the box enough. Really, instead of getting people to sign old-fashioned contracts, they should emulate the EULA. You know, by putting up a plaque in their office which says something like this:
Amateurs.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Deaths and paralysis That's just from a quick google for "chiropractic harm", there are MANY MANY more.
It would be unenforceable. You would have been forced to sign under duress to seek potentially life saving treatment, if you were able to sign at all.
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He is a troll and you are ignorant.
Demons of stupidity be gone from this man, rAmen!
Educate thyself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cervical
You would have to go to court and spend thousands of dollars you may not have to fight such a thing.
Legal or not, the mere cost of fighting it will silence many people.
I'm not sold on this. If I was a dentist, lets say, and I want good reviews, I'll ask my customers to please rate me on such and such a site. You will _always_ have bad reviews and as a person who frequently reads reviews, I know how to filter out good and badly written reviews. If there are 10 great reviews and one complaining that the service wasn't covered under insurance or something like that, I wouldn't hold it against the dentist.
What's even more interesting, is that I actively seek out the bad reviews. When it comes to game reviews, for example, I go to the compilation sites like gamerankings etc, and purposely read the reviews that rated the game the worst. You can tell a lot about a game by the way the critical reviewers tear it apart. Maybe they only gripe about the graphics or something that just doesn't matter to me. If that's all they can muster, I can usually count on a quality experience.
Same happened when I was searching for a new dentist. The one I picked had some negative reviews, but they all boiled down to "while they were friendly and made you feel at ease.. (some complaint about money here)." So the negative review may or may not hurt "my" dentist in the long run, but I picked him because of the CONTENT of those negative reviews. The worst thing people could say was some of the stuff he did didn't end up covered fully under their particular insurance plans, that sucks, but it's your job to make sure the work will be covered before submitting to it!
In the end, the ones that censor reviews, usually have a reason why they fear them.
I kind of understand where these Dentists are coming from. I used to work at a pool construction company that was heavily impacted by unwarranted negative reviews online.
Pool owners are the worst; they're usually well off, used to getting their way, and generally don't understand how construction time tables work. They usually start thinking of a pool in March, or April, and want it done and open for Memorial Day or the 4th of July. They usually don't understand we have more than one customer who all also want their pool done on the same timeframe. Further, they don't understand we can't work in bad weather, which means time tables tend to slip in the rainy season.
So inevitably, people get delayed and it's the end of the world for them because they won't have their pool open for their all important Memorial Day BBQ. So they fly online and rant and rave about how awful our business is, because they couldn't read their contract. And of course, if you type our name into Google, the first three results that come up are from ripoffreports.com or a similar site.
What's worse is these stay online forever. We've made most all of our customers happy in the end, and they've told us they would take down or redact the negative reviews, but even they can't. So because they flew off the handle despite our goodwill efforts, we're the ones that have to suffer.
So, while I feel like the Doctor's approach isn't the most tactful, I understand where he's coming form.
I would be curious if the threat of withholding health services could be considered duress.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
When you seek out bad reviews, don't you tend to find a whole lot of ones where someone is stuck reviewing a genre they don't like or have some weird complaint that doesn't affect the game properly? I tend to see that a lot on places like Metacritic. If you look up StarCraft II and the review complains about how annoying it is that you're controlling little people instead of getting down in the action and shooting stuff personally, and how using the keyboard and mouse are too complicated, well, I think it was just the wrong reviewer for the job.
I read the internet for the articles.
I did RTFA. (yesterday, actually). A better subtitle might have been: "Scummy legal group duping doctors to request legally-unenforceable waivers from patients. Don't get caught in the loop." Doctors (or their business managers) need to be educated about why these waivers are unnecessary, unenforcable, and just bad business. Patients need to be informed and willing to fight back so this type of legal chicanery dies a quick death.
Original post was saying the average person has no right to criticize, as the average person is a "faux connoisseur." I was responding to this elitist post, a post that was engaging in class warfare by claiming the average person has no right to complain, as they are all just whiny egotistical complainers who are too stupid to critique the goods and services they receive.
Bullshit. This is just another elitist moaning that his sheep-like customers aren't being as sheep-like as they are supposed to be. How DARE they get together and compare notes? How is he supposed to take advantage of them, as is his right as an elite, if they actually talk to each other? There aught to be a law!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Ya, I do run into that a lot. But that's why I don't mind the bad reviews. If you put up a review that casts a negative light on something and I read that review, if I come out of that thinking your negative points were superficial and not really relevant (or to your point, just bashing the genre or controller they don't like), I'm going to think wow, that was a negative review, and that's all they had to say about it? That in my mind HELPs the game/product/service.
Then again, if the bad reviews are well thought out and bring up really good points, say, the doctor likes to make up things you don't believe you have (had those before) or puts the sales pitch on you for whitening, etc, or maybe fondles you while you're out, ya, ok. Those I could see doctors wanting to control, I mean, those would be bad for business. But general negative reviews with no real basis in practical reality, so what? No one has a perfect record (even if they did, I'd be suspicious). Let the negative reviewers speak their peace and let the positive ones drown them out.
IANAL, but...
Two good examples: real estate transfers and copyright transfers, both of which require specific written language.
The dentist's contract is inconsistent with the copyright law's requirements for copyright transfer (and hence is null and void, as a matter of law).
It is extortion for the doctor or dentist to use his position of authority so to attempt to coerce the patient in a manner contrary to law.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Doctors should be worried, because yelp can be gamed, and they'll let the gaming happen if it's in their best interest... An anecdotal story.
I've work in a karaoke bar the last 10 years. This is before American Idol made it go crazy popular. FF>> to a few years ago...
There was a local karaoke company (this is multiple individuals, not one guy in a bar like me) who were tired of all the good press, yelp reviews, and awards our place has gotten over the years. They'd play favourites with karaoke singers to gain favour with them, then have them write negative reviews about our place (without even having set foot ONCE in there)
Around the same time yelp starts calling, "We can sort those bad reviews to the bottom of the list for $400@mo" I'd be on the phone with these jackasses for hours, saying these reviews were bogus, and how dare you try and extort money from us...
Few days later, bad review start floating to the top. The little "soundbites" (don't know what else to call them, the little highlighted bits of reviews at the top) started being nothing but negative.
I got tired of it. Being the old school dickhead BOFH that I am, I started dropping dox weekly on our website of yelp employees one by one(upper level management mostly, was leading up to stoppleman). Sure, I'd get threats, but I'd just give them the same bullshit answer they gave me, "Hey, it's publicly available info man, just like you guys told me!"
One day the owner's son (of where I work) came down to talk to me. He said, "Dude, I know these guys, they got a lawyer full time on staff, they just gotta drop this off on their desk and say "attack". Please, take down the docs.
So I did. And magically these dickheads reviews got sorted, or deleted.
Moral of the story is, yelp is fucking corrupt. If your competitor wants to slander you on yelp, you have 0 recourse without full legal action. Fuck you yelp, go suck a dick. (and yes I probably typed something similar before)
By a recent study, so is brisk walking, but combining the two can be a trifle awkward.
Who is John Cabal?