Rather than being interested in the well-being of his patients, Dr. Stuart Kilian seems to be more interested in making money without much effort, I would not recommend this place.
To begin with, I met the charismatic Dr. Stu at a street festival, May 2016. He had a booth there and was offering a free quick evaluation of people's spines. That should have warned me, but I had lots of lower back and neck pain, so I gave it a try. He used a gadget to determine I had imbalances in my spine convincing me to book a consultation including X-Rays for only $20. That sounded almost too good to be true, but since I never had X-Rays done and suffer from my lumbar vertebrae sprain a few years ago, I agreed to see Dr. Stu the following week.
Turns out that the $20 became quickly $90 when the good doctor talked me into getting 4 X-rays (front view and side view) rather than just the 2 x-rays that were included in the session. Alarm bells already rang in my head, but since I needed the x-rays I swallowed the doubt and paid the price. When I asked him to email me the x-rays, Dr. Stu was only willing to send me 2 out of 4. I would have to pay an extra $70 for the 2 additional copies, which I found quite outrageous.
Nonetheless I was ready to start my treatment during the first session, since my back was in a lot of pain. But that wasn't possible, because he would not treat me without having me first sit through a 1.5 hour group presentation the following day. This is something he does on a regular basis in order to convince as many people to subscribe to an expensive long-term treatment plan. In this group session, after harshly dismissing other medical treatments such as general practitioners or physiotherapy, Dr. Stu uses arguments resembling scare-tactics to get more clients. With terms like "vertebral subluxation" and "spinal degeneration" he shows worst case scenario x-rays of patients that suffered from accidents or extremely bad posture. He said that if people with spinal misalignment don't get treatment, they would suffer severe consequences in old age or sooner. His sales pitch worked on me, especially after he told me I was at Stage 3 out of Stage 5 of spinal degeneration.
On top of that, he asks each person attending the session to write down the contact information of family/friends affected by spine-related problems to obtain them as clients. So I signed up for a 3-month plan that he said would cost close to $1900. Dr. Stu convinced me that he could help me with my back pains. I paid $500 for the first month up front and promptly received my first treatment.
And now here is where it gets really interesting. I've had many sport related injuries in my life and had my fair share of physio, acupuncture, osteopathy and chiro treatments and each practitioner spent a sufficient amount of time with me in order to treat the roots of my problems.
Not Dr. Stuart Kilian. He has a huge client turn-around, sweatshop-like. Every session I witnessed him treating 3-5 people waiting in line within minutes. He will spend 3 minutes per session with you, not more, not less. You lie down on 1 of the two treatment tables, wait until he's done with the other patient, tells you to breathe in deeply, cracks your back, your neck and you're pretty much done.
One time I inflamed my knee cap after a workout, I mentioned this to Dr. Stu, he didn't even bother looking at it. He literally said that he's only interested in the x-rays that were taken, any immediate pain is irrelevant in the course of the long term treatment.
I was extremely irritated by his approach, but because I prepaid for treatment, I continued to visit him 3 times a week for petty 3 minute sessions for a total of 4 weeks. At the same time I started seeing my old osteopath who returned from her vacation and she actually helped me with my problems and alleviated my pain, enabling me to go back to stretching and light workouts. Needless to say, the osteopath was shocked when I told her about Dr. Stuarts ways of doing business and advised me to proceed with extreme caution.
Another thing that made me doubt Dr. Stu's narrow-minded approach:
He promises you a session where he shows you a great deal of exercises that promote physical activity such as stretching and core training, but the session will take place only after one full month of treatment. Ready to be proactive, I asked him why I had to wait 1 month to receive this session and was patronized, he smiled at me and told me that I was a funny guy. He then handed me a print-out of a few exercises which seemed to be the extent of that informative session.
During my weekly visits, suddenly his initial assessment of 3 months became 6 for no reason, even though I was on the way to recovery thanks to my osteopath. I decided to end my treatment after 4 weeks. I spoke to other Chiropractors who assured me this behavior is not representative of a practitioner caring about the well-being of their patients. read more
