Dr. Daniel Yongche Shin, MD

I saw this doctor about 1998 when his practice was brand new, so don't put a lot of stock in my comment, because everyone grows, learns, changes, and I hope he has. I think the problem was, I got the impression that Dr. Shin had been hired by my insurance company to disprove the need for pain management, a year after a lumbar spinal fusion surgery had failed. So that was his attitude ~ we're here to prove you're malingering. To that end, he conducted a series of diagnostic tests, including an EMG (electromyelogram) which is normally quite painful, testing the nerves to see if there is an impingement that prevents the transmission of an electrical signal from one point to another. A simplistic description involves inserting pointed electrical probes into a muscle at both ends of the muscle, and transmitting an electrical pulse and measuring whether the signal arrives intact at the far end. Dr. Shin was very humane in how he conducted this test, which could have been very painful, by… providing a medication which would mitigate the pain without affecting the outcome. This was just one of many tests, and it turned out that I was indeed experiencing the pain I was describing, and pain management was approved. I could not get him to provide copies of the test results that proved nerve damage, and he would not even give me a verbal explanation of his findings. I told him that I understood that he had to report to whomever had hired him to diagnose, but that does not require an assumption that everyone who walks through his door is faking, that he could actually assume every patient is telling the Truth, and relate to them accordingly, until the tests prove otherwise. People in pain could benefit on many levels from even a small dose of compassion. It would make the experience much easier to endure for people who are truly in pain, if they're not treated like liars from the moment they cross the threshold. He made no comment, nor apology. While Dr. Shin was humane by minimizing the pain his tests would inflict, but he could have used a little compassionate courtesy. But it's been 20 years since then ~ I'm sure he has learned this difference in the meanwhile.