A few weeks ago, a friend of mine called me and asked me if I could refer him to a rhinoplasty surgeon in New York. His brother lives in New York and his brother wanted to have his surgery done in New York, as opposed to flying out to LA. I told him that I would ask a colleague of mine who he would recommend, since my colleague, also a board-certified plastic surgeon, had done his residency at NYU and continues to maintain close ties with colleagues in New York. I gave my friend the names of two surgeons in New York and, within minutes, I received a frantic call from my friend, “I looked up the two surgeons and the first one was rated only two stars! I can’t believe your colleague would give me the name of a surgeon with only two stars! There is no way I am sending my brother to him!” I just shook my head. A referral from a respected, board-certified surgeon is absolutely as good as it gets – to rely on a message board over a surgeon’s referral struck me as absolutely insane. But it got me thinking about the power that some of these plastic surgery web sites wield.
One thing that is probably fairly obvious to many people is that the doctors who pay more get the best placement on most sites. So, if a patient is in a hurry and just glances at a site and jots down the names of the first few doctors that are placed most prominently on the site, that patient is limiting herself to just those doctors that have simply paid for the best placement. In many cases, these are the doctors that need the business – they made a business decision that it was worth it to spend thousands of dollars to be placed prominently on the site because it will generate business and justify the cost.
Something that many people may not know is how the message boards and rating systems work. Presumably, most people go to the message boards to see what other patients have to say about a certain doctor. However, are those comments praising the doctor really from satisfied patients? Maybe not. I recently met the CEO of a web marketing company who described a type of marketing that his company does in which he and his team get paid by doctors to regularly log onto all the plastic surgery message boards and rave about those doctors. The CEO’s employees pose as patients and rave about what a wonderful surgeon so-and-so is and how they wouldn’t go anywhere else and how the doctor changed their lives, etc. The more the doctor pays, the more time the team will spend posting glowing reviews about the doctor. The CEO said, “If you visit some of these web sites, you will see names of doctors you never heard of with rave reviews and ten stars out of ten. You will also notice that some of the top doctors have fewer rave reviews, fewer stars and often more negative comments.”
I had always just assumed that many surgeons out there routinely had their nurses and secretaries post glowing reviews of them; in fact, I’m sure many surgeons personally post glowing reviews of themselves! However, I hadn’t realized that companies actually get paid to do that. Just after I heard about these tactics, a company called the “LifeStyle Lift” was fined for just that – employees were posing as patients raving about the merits of the LifeStyle Lift.
As with most things in life, caveat emptor applies to plastic surgery message boards and web sites as well.
