Dr. Tony Chan, MD

My email to Dr. Chan: I want to share directly with you about how horrible my experience with you was. While of course it’s necessary to outline all the possible outcomes from surgery, I’ve experienced as terrible bedside manner before as I did with you. I have never been treated with such a lack of empathy as you discussed potential “life-altering debilitating pain” I could experience post surgery, even after I shared how I’ve already navigated a lifetime of severe chronic pain. And of course you made sure to emphasize that as a person with anxiety, which frankly you had no right to diagnosis, I would be more predisposed to this “life-altering” chronic pain. This of course would only greatly increase anyone’s anxiety around the situation and make them feel culpable if they experienced such an outcome. To further demonstrate your lack of capacity for emotional attunement or empathy as well as your lack of professionalism, you made a discriminatory joke about another patient’s anxiety… comparing them to a character from The Office. If you ridiculed another patient in front of me, what am I to except you would say about me to others? Do you think I’d want a doctor who makes fun of patients performing my surgery?! Just in case you don’t remember or your notes aren’t clear, you suggested surgery for me based on a photo we took of the buldge on my groin since we couldn’t recreate the buldge in the office, claiming with absolutely certainty that there was nothing else it could be. I want you to know, I got a second opinion from another surgeon who recommend I get a CT scan, fully agreeing that it would be absolutely vital to know for sure before cutting my body open. Well, turns out the CT scan shows no hernia. If you had cut me open, making me susceptible to increased chronic pain for the rest of my life for absolutely no reason, which you made me feel complete terror around, you better believe I would be suing you for malpractice. I wish I could hold you responsible for the emotional harm you’ve created. Research shows that doctors with good bedside manner are far less likely to be sued for malpractice, regardless of the injury they cause. It would serve you well to remember that. It’s not just my faith in your competency that has been utterly destroyed, but you also undermined my faith in all of the doctors at Kaiser. You have seriously committed harm without even doing the futile surgery you were strongly advocating for without doing the basic tests to ensure its necessity. I wonder how many hundreds of other patients you’ve impacted in such a way that they also no longer trust our medical system. Please go back and revisit the Hippocratic oath and truly sit with the harm you are causing because I know it’s not just me who has been negatively impacted by your inflated sense of superiority. Surgeons are not gods. I hope you can check your ego long enough to take in this feedback so you can offer more quality care to your future patients and treat them with the empathy and compassion every human deserves.

Not a good person

He doesn't care and sounds like he hate his job

Had a bad experience, he was very careless, he just wanted to get rid of me without any help. I don't know why he spent years of medical education if he don't want to help make human lives better. "I have seen worse" was his response to my problem. Just because he has seen worse conditions in patients doesn't mean I don't deserve care. Generally, doctors in America are the highest paid compared to the rest of the world but they are also the most unethical and careless I have ever seen. This one is a perfect example.