Jonathan R. Goff, MD

Any google search or Dr Goff will uncover lots of bad reviews. Maybe you think these are fake. Or maybe you think they are just one or two disgruntled patients over the course of Dr Goff’s 20 plus year career. Don’t be fooled. You have been warned. Everything about the bad reviews is true. Dr Goff is truly a horrendous doctor. If you have no where else to go, then you just didn’t try hard enough. But if you enjoy getting zero information from your doctor, getting X-rays and MRI’s during a visit where he looks at you condescendingly for the 2 minutes he spends with you and then waiting days for results, and not understanding one thing that’s going on with you, then Dr Goff is your guy. Again, you have been warned.

I went to DR goff for shoulder post traumatic arthiritis on both shoulders. one good thing was he said I should try rest and cortisone just in case surgery woudl be avoidable. it did not work however, so i got surgery on both shoulders. the surgery worked quite well and my shoulders were eventually better. the one issue was, after my second surgery, i did not see him even once in the first five weeks and the PA gave me bad advise and said i could do chiropratic back therapy 2 weeks out. this was not good, it lead to my shoulder being aggrivated for 3-4 more months than it should have. 12 weeks after surgery, i saw him and he said that should not have happened and gave me good advice. sometimes his explanation detail was not great either, so i would reccomend him, but make sure to see him after surgery and ask for details.

I wanted to share my awful experience with Dr. Jonathan Goff, to warn other prospective patients to avoid this bad surgeon if possible. After breaking my humeral head in a mountain biking accident, Goff was assigned to me by Marin General Hospital. In surgery he was unable to align my bones (so now I’m dealing with a permanent joint deformity) and was careless inserting the hardware to secure the fracture, specifically, the plate was misaligned and he left a large screw sticking out of my bone into my joint. This severely limited my motion and created a chronic pain syndrome. When I told him of my ongoing pain he was insensitive and not interested, dismissing that I needed large doses of opioids to get through the night. He said “trust me, I saw that the screw was in the bone”, even though the X-ray showed something else! Dr. Goff can get very defensive and belligerent when faced with questions. Once he told me aggressively, “I think you must have hit your head in the bike… accident and have a concussion, since you asked the same question previously”, which I indeed did because of his habit to blow off questions dismissively! Another time he started shouting at me when I needed to redirect a conversation after he had misunderstood my question. Despite my pleas to start rehabilitation, Dr. Goff kept me in my sling passed what I have learned is best practice, and after 10 weeks of complete immobility I built up a tremendous amount of scar tissue in the joint (which a follow-up arthroscopic procedure could not even penetrate), creating long-term problems. I’m considering filing a complaint with the California Medical Board based on the encouragement of several doctor friends, who feel Dr. Goff’s behavior and poor practice should be sanctioned. Over the past few months, three separate therapists from around Marin complained to me about Dr. Goff saying he was (at best) an awful communicator and had hindered patient progress/recovery because of this and his intimidating style.