WHY YOUR RIGHT TO REVIEW YOUR DOCTOR ONLINE IS SO IMPORTANT:
1. Why should you have less information about your doctor than your dinner?
Online reviews are an essential part of how you choose what products and services to buy. Just like you expect to read reviews of restaurants before eating there, you should expect to know more about doctors before entrusting them with your medical care. Online reviews often provide valuable information to make these decisions. Reviews from other patients may tell you if a doctor is up-to-date on the latest medical technologies, listens to patients’ concerns, has unusually long wait times, and follows-up with patients as promised. Anti-review contracts from Medical Justice are designed to cut off these crucial information resources for patients.
2. Do you want a doctor who doesn’t want your feedback?
The feedback that patients provide in online reviews can help doctors do a better job. As Dr. Shaili Jain wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, “[online reviews] are so inspiring that they make me want to work harder and better for my own patients . . . . I’m discovering what patients think makes a good doctor, what they value and deem essential to high-quality care, and what gets them really riled.” When doctors ask you to sign anti-review contracts, it indicates that they don’t want to hear from you about how they can improve their care.
3. Can you trust a doctor who conditions your care on your silence?
Doctors are supposed to help us with some of the most important life decisions we’ll ever make at some of our most vulnerable times. We need to trust them implicitly. However, when a doctor asks us to sign away our rights to speak before agreeing to treat us, that bond of trust is broken. Anti-review contracts put the doctor’s financial well-being and reputation ahead of your medical needs–something the AMA medical ethics codes prohibit.
[Note: we initially posted this page in 2011. A few months later, Medical Justice “retired” its form. In 2016, Congress enacted the Consumer Review Fairness Act banning anti-review contracts.]