Dr. Meredith Rae Gershon, MD

Terrible attitude. I saw her in 2015 after a vitrectomy with ERM peel caused my vision to go from 20/20 to 20/80 (corrected). Dr. Gershon yelled at me "There's nothing I can do!" and said "You'll have to live with it!". The problem I had, but didn't know it at the time, was the surgeon who did the vitrectomy, didn't remove all the Epiretinal Membrane (ERM). The residual ERM continued to shrink and as it did, it pulled and wrinkled the macula area of my retina. This macula pucker is what gave me very, very bad vision. I'd had the operation about a year before I saw Gershon. Her response was a terrible blow to me. When I meekly protested there must be something that can be done, she said, in a condescending huff, to come back and bring all my past year's OCT scans. OCT is a type of xray that takes detailed pictures of the retina. I was so discouraged by her bitter attitude I never went back, but went to another - much better - ophthalmologist instead. He told me about… the residual ERM and how it was causing extreme macula pucker. He said the residual ERM should've been removed as soon as it was noticed. He said not removing the ERM had caused permanent damage to my photoreceptor cells (rods and cones). He said the residual ERM was now so bad the only thing to do was to remove the first layer of my retina, called the Internal Limiting Membrane (ILM). So now I need an ILM peel, which carries certain risks, including inducing scotoma's (blind spots in your field of vision). I'm going to have the ILM peel to preserve whatever vision I have left in my bad eye. If something ever happens to my other eye, my bad eye might have to function as my good eye. Interestingly enough, I ran into another of Dr. Gershon's former patients. Dr. Gershon had told this man he had MD, macula degeneration, and there was nothing she could do for him. I convinced him to see another ophthalmologist who told this man that he had a macular hole, not macula degeneration. Macula holes, if not too big, can be repaired. This man's vision could've, should've, and would've been fixed several years ago if Meredith R. Gershon hadn't misdiagnosed him and then told him there was nothing she could do for him. The oath doctors swear includes a part where they agree to refer patients to another doctor if they don't think they can help the patient. If Gershon had done that with me and the guy I met and described above, we might not have such bad, permanent vision loss as we do today.