04/25/2024
Well, as most of my long term clients may know, I do not usually respond to social media drama until the reputation of the hospital is wrongfully dragged through the mud. Recently, there have been some online posts from a Bob Doppelheuer (he was blocked from our page last week) complaining how we fired him and withheld medicine from his dog. As is the case with most of these ridiculous complaints, there are many very crucial details that have been conveniently omitted from his online rants. It usually takes a lot of non-sensical and idiotic behavior for us to terminate a client. We made a policy a couple of years ago basically stating that we were NOT going to tolerate any disrespectful, ignorant, and/or aggressive behavior from any client, any longer. We have such a busy hospital, and serve so many wonderful clients and their pets, that we just don’t have room for the ignorant ones any more. This entire situation stems from Bob and his wife feeling that their prescription for their dog’s diarrhea wasn’t filled in the time frame that they thought was appropriate (within several hours), and how I did not respond to their request immediately (their problem was more important than my appointments that day). I cannot go into details here because of client confidentiality, but Bob’s dog was not dying nor did it require anything close to emergency care (he actually declined an appointment that morning that was offered to him). In Bob’s online complaints, he makes it sound like we withheld crucial medicine from an extremely sick or dying patient. Anyone that knows me well enough, or any of our long time staff, we would NEVER withhold medicine from any patient in that type of scenario. He also forgets to mention, that even after his wife’s tirade on the phone about meds not being filled on time (and how we are not busy, how we are incompetent, and how we are liars, etc. etc.), we DID actually fill his dog’s medicine that evening for 10 days. It was after all of that, that the termination letter was prepared. So, as it is with many situations in life, there are always two sides to every story. We all need to remember this when we read any online reviews!! I would also like to remind everyone, that on any given day, your veterinarian is acting as a regular doctor’s office seeing regularly scheduled appointments, taking on ER cases, filling prescriptions in the pharmacy, taking large amounts of phone calls for a myriad of reasons, and doing surgery on certain days. In human medicine, almost all of those tasks are completely divided up amongst your P*P, the ER, the pharmacy, and the surgery center. I would love for Bob and his wife to hang out at our front desk on a busy Monday. I wonder if they would tell us after that, that we’re “not busy”. And for any of our faithful clients, feel free to share this post wherever you see any of Bob’s online rants in the future! Thank you!
Justin Kontir VMD
