Thread: Dentist Threatens to Sue Patient for Negative Yelp Review

It turns out that Doctors/Dentists are having their patients fill out forms that prevent them from leaving negative reviews on social medial.

The Dentist in question is invoicing the patient $100 each day the negative review remains.

Dentist Threatens to Sue Patient for Negative Yelp Review | ABC News - Yahoo!

I saw that article on the web today. If a dentist required me to sign something like that, I would know that I picked the wrong dentist.

I seriously doubt that a doctor or dentist could collect in court for something like that, but they could make life difficult.

Luckily this story went public, this can be a worrisome trend;

The company claims about 3,000 doctors and dentists use the forms, according to Public Citizen.

It will defeat the purpose of online reviews which are already biased.

I think that people who want to post bad reviews will simply take greater measures to remain anonymous so that the doctor or dentist has more difficulty identifying them. Of course, if the incident is very specific, he or she will still know who they are. The anonymity of the web can be a problem anytime some wacko want to flame someone.

Bad reviews and troublesome reports are a big problem for physicians. I received a call from one a couple of years ago. He was so paranoid that he refused to identify himself and called from a pay phone. He wanted to know how to remove an article from a government site that mentioned his conviction on a drug charge from ten years earlier. He said that the report suddenly showed up in a top 10 position in Google when anyone does a search for his name and as a result he lost more than 75% of his business. I don't do reputation management work, so I referred him to reputation.com. Basically, all you can do other than to request that bad reviews be removed (most sites will not remove them, especially if it sounds legitimate) is to flood the web with positive articles (frequently phoney) to push the negative articles down.