This is an edit to my earlier review of 4 stars stating that Dr. Arsht is great, but it's a shame that his front office staff dress like strippers and are extremely rude and borderline incompetent.
I'm editing it because of an unfortunate experience I had with Dr. Arsht. Now, I do believe Dr. Arsht to be a skilled Dr and Surgeon, but I do not agree with the way he ultimately handled my case and it's a shame because I felt like he just "gave up" on me. I'll leave you to decide.
I had injured my shoulder in June 2010 and began seeing him in August 2010. I thought he was very compassionate and agreed with his courses of treatment (not too conservative but not too quick to cut me open either) which eventually lead to him feeling I needed shoulder surgery for a SLAP lesion. fair enough. I'm very active and agreed with surgery, I just wanted to get it over and done with ASAP before returning to my regular season in March/April 2011. Now, I had a similar but much worse injury back in 2005 in my other shoulder that ended up needing open surgery as opposed to arthroscopic once they got in there and saw the full extent of the damage... in my appt to see Dr Arsht two weeks before the scheduled surgery, I voiced this concern and asked him the likelihood of this happening again - he said zero. absolutely no chance. he said based on my MRI films and x-rays, the damage was much less and he thought the surgery would remain arthroscopic and very simple at that.
Now, I will say that in the 3 months I saw Dr. Arsht, I did notice he was not in the office a lot due to vacations - I'm pretty sure he took 3 of them while I saw him, one of them was a long weekend somewhere right before my scheduled surgery - from which he called me the Friday morning before my Monday morning scheduled surgery.
He told me that although this was very difficult for him to do and although he had lost sleep over the decision the previous two nights, upon reviewing my MRIs and my patient history with the other shoulder surgery I had 5 years ago again, he felt more comfortable referring me to his more experienced colleague since he had a feeling the surgery might require going in open again! I was shocked to get this news, in the 11th hour no less, but I was thankful that he voiced his concerns and he was handing me off to a more experienced colleague... I was, however, very worried about the timing of everything - here I was emotionally, mentally and physically ready for surgery and he just hands me off to someone else with no guarantee that it could be done anytime soon!
Not to worry, or so I was told - he said he had already spoken with the surgeon who could see me that Monday and that she most likely could do the surgery on Tuesday - only one day later. I felt good about this... I felt that Dr. Arsht was taking care of me, and he really cared about me. I felt that he knew what I was going through and I believed him when he assured me that he'd do everything in his power to make sure this surgery happened ASAP.
Boy was I in for a surprise. First of all, when I saw his more experienced colleague, Dr. Cuomo (who actually did the surgery in my other shoulder - the only reason I saw Arsht in the first place was because Cuomo was no longer in my network), she had no idea what he was talking about - she said it was a very simple surgery and she would absolutely not need to go in open. But then again, she IS more experienced and maybe she just confirmed something Arsht just wasn't 100% about - fine. BUT surgery on Tuesday? no way in hell. She was all booked up for the next 5 weeks...
This is when I began to call Dr. Arsht again... what happened to you doing everything in your power to get me on the table ASAP?! I guess once he handed me over to Dr. Cuomo, he just forgot about me because none of my calls were ever returned. By some stroke of amazingly good luck, there was a cancellation and I was able to get 11/9 for a date and the actual surgery happened 3 weeks later than originally scheduled as opposed to 5 weeks, but that's because of Dr. Cuomo's amazing surgery coordinator, not Dr. Arsht. I never heard from him again.
I had the surgery on Tuesday 11/9 and all went well - Dr. Cuomo put in three anchors via arthroscopic surgery only needing three portals. She has done a great job... and my one request? Dr. Arsht is not even allowed in the OR as she worked... I didn't want him getting a cent by pegging himself an assistant during the surgery. I'm just disgusted the guy never bothered to call me again - he just pushed me off his plate onto Dr. Cuomo's probably because he wanted to extend his vacation. I actually think the guy didn't bother looking at my MRI films until the wknd before the scheduled surgery. Someone needs to take a few ethics courses, in my opinion. read more