doctor to do, and what he was able to do because the patient did want to make a bad complaint, I said, "You see 30 people a day who love you, which means you've got 150 visits a week of people coming to this office who absolutely adore you. Ask patients, say, 'Hey, if you don't mind, would you mind making a comment on Yelp for me, to give a positive review?'" And most people are happy to do it. When I like something and the person asks me to, I will, and all of a sudden, before you know it, that person did make a review, but now it's buried 10 pages deep, and most people aren't going to even search that far. They're going to look through a few, particularly when it comes to a doctor, so we're just trying to set a tone where doctors want to be careful when patients use that. And I won't say that's common, but that's one of the ones that concerns me, is that whenever you get into that issue, when a patient's making an issue with you, do try to do some things to control it in the office, to say, "Okay, well, how can we resolve it?" Instead of leading to these altercations where you go online, now the doctor's tempted, because he's so mad, to respond. And I always tell everyone, "Take a breath, relax, read it, think about it," because if you respond quickly, of course, as we all would, we're going to be a little hot-headed, and we're going to put ourselves in jeopardy, because the person who has the biggest risk is us, not that patient. Absolutely, and that's a great point, in that, don't ever respond from an emotional point of view, because that will never get you anywhere in a productive way. So when we do respond, I think it is important to let everyone know that a response is necessary, but never get into the specifics of what they put out there. Always keep it light and inviting. As you said, mainly setting the tone of how you interact as the professional, rather than the person making the complaint, but something that Michael said earlier on in the show that I thought was really a good lead-in, we could learn from some of these reviews. Not all of them are, "Got you," bad reviews, like we're talking about. Some of them may be, "Hey, I went to that doctor's office, and man, it was not clean," or, "I went to the doctor's office, he didn't really listen to me well," where I think that should be a wake-up call, have a team meeting with your staff, and say, "Hey, what do we do so that no one ever thinks that of this office again," and use the review as a productive mechanism, and still respond. "Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I'm sorry you felt that way. As a result of what you said, we've already done a thorough housecleaning," or, "I'm sorry you felt that way, that I wasn't listening to you. I certainly was. I'd love to have a followup conversation with you. Let's set it up," or something to that effect, just to demonstrate that you're hearing that person, first and foremost. But also, it may be things that you really should be told that people aren't telling you to your face, like, "When the heck are you going to clean this carpet? It's been 15 years I've been coming here and I see my footprints from 14 years ago," and we can laugh about it, but at the same time, I know examples that it would
Dr. Hoffman:
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