Dr. Elaine Rima Gecht, MD

Very kind knowledge

Clearly Dr. Gecht has paid a reputation service to log on to vitals.com and pad her reviews with fake 5-star reviews. It should be very easy to spot these fake 5-star reviews, they don't even refer to her by name, and all of them are 1 or 2 lines long and contain generic boilerplate statements. Read the longer reviews - that will give you the real picture. This woman made $270,000 in 2014 according to publicly available data. My experience with her caring for my relative is that she was lazy, disengaged, and in a hurry to commit euthanasia. She almost never initiated contact with me or discussed my relative's case. I thought she was horrible.

Md was very accurate kind helpful and diagnosed me where others failed

Excellent experience from beginning to end. Dr. Gecht helped us care lovingly for our father helping him heroically through complex hospitalization to comfort care for ten wonderful years.

Compassionate, brilliant , sensative, warm, kind physician.

When my late mother moved into the Jewish Home, she was assigned to Dr. Gecht. It was a lucky thing. Dr. Gecht gave me her private number (I didn't realize this is what it was) and was accesible at all times. She is intelligent and compassionate and I felt I had a partner in caring for my mother.

In my first meeting with Dr. Gecht she showed up wearing very short culottes over bare legs, chatting with staff in a casual manner about having just run the SF Marathon. Very unprofessional. Then when I asked her whether I could sit in on a session with the speech/swallow therapist, she said she'd let me know when the next session would be. The referring doctor had recommended therapy, and my mother, right after her stroke, had been able, with help, to sit up and brush her hair. In other words, the jury was still out on how much progress she would make. Plus, MediCare would pay for something like three months of therapy. However, when I called a month later to enquire, because I hadn't heard from Dr. Gecht, she brusquely told me that they had discontinued the physical therapy. Essentially, they had discontinued it BEFORE our meeting, they just didn't tell me.Even worse, this doctor wanted to let my mother die rather than figure out why her blood pressure had dropped. She… called me and brusquely asked me if I wanted her to give my mother "comfort care" (=let her die) or send her to the ER. She did not offer a reason why my mother's BP had dropped, and practically hung up on me when I asked. I opted to send her to the ER where the excellent ER staff took a blood and urine sample and diagnosed a simple urinary tract infection, which was easily treated with antibiotics. When my mother was returned to the nursing home (and to Dr. Gecht's control), I rescinded the DNR/DNI (Do Not Resuscitate, Do Not Intubate) directive because I didn't want Dr. Gecht to have the option to withhold treatment for my mother. Dr. Gecht called me and SCREAMED at me that it was "cruel" to keep sending my mother to the ER. As opposed to letting her DIE of an undiagnosed urinary tract infection that was easily treated? She then insulted me repeatedly, threatened to hang up on me, and told me that my mother was going to be back in the hospital in a few days anyway. Then she told me that by law she could override my directives and withhold treatment if she decided that it would be "medically futile." I said "You mean to say you believe you have the right to KILL my mother? Please send me a copy of the law that says you can do that." She said she would have the nursing home's lawyer send me a copy - she never did, because she was LYING. "Medically futile" refers to somebody whose heart has stopped who would die anyway within minutes, or situations like that. NOT a stable stroke victim who has an undiagnosed UTI that is easily treated, if the doctor isn't too lazy.I sent a letter to the medical director of the hospital the next day and had my mother transferred to the care of another doctor. Not only was my mother NOT back in the hospital in a few days, she lived another two years under the care of a decent doctor.Dr. Gecht is a City employee who makes $150,000 a year. Your tax dollars at work. I call her "Dr. Death." Hope your elderly parent or relative NEVER ends up in her hands. She is arrogant, thinks she knows better than her patients' relatives, and will alternately bully, ignore, and talk down to you.