Like a previous reviewer who gave Dr. Cafaro 5 stars, I have been her patient for over 20 years…read more Unlike him I am not surprised that people give mixed reviews, but I believe the reviews are mixed primarily because her front desk staff unfortunately does not represent the quality or character of the practice as a whole - that is, the service is spotty and, to be honest, one member of the front staff is downright surly. When I first began seeing Dr. Cafaro in 1992 her office staff was efficient, empathetic, entertaining, and most loveable - the best office staff I had ever had the pleasure of going through when I needed to see my doctor. I have no idea what happened as people moved on in their careers and others were hired. She took me as her patient in the wake of a catastrophic year in which they had lost 14 men to AIDS. Newly arrived in San Francisco, I had been phoning through a lengthy list to find a doctor. I was turned down time after time, and I was fortunate to be added to Dr. Cafaro's patient roll. Over the years Dr. Cafaro has become one of the nation's most respected doctors in the field of retroviruses, dealing daily with HIV, HepC, and other medical nightmares that have, as a result of her work and that of so many others, gradually been brought under some semblance of control.
Dr. Cafaro is the most brilliant personal physician I have known. She is able to take random symptoms and make sense of them. She is a healer. And she takes her time. One person describes her as garrulous, not negatively; I would not, however, agree. She has a wonderful sense of humor, but over the course of an appointment, she gathers odd bits of information, sometimes seemingly unrelated, and by appointment end, she generally secures a solution to even enigmatic difficulties. Also, unlike many physicians trained in western medicine, she recommends medical practices that fall under the umbrella of medical care, but are often viewed skeptically by western doctors. She does not deny the power of eastern medicine, for example, and if she is perplexed by a condition will recommend naturopathy and other umbrella practices.
Her primary PA, Jennifer Chen, is well trained, efficient, and brusque. She provides a counterpoint to Dr. Cafaro's more leisurely approach to medicine, but, unlike a previous PA who remained only a short time, she is excellent at what she does. She is blunt, can be skeptical, but unlike one brutal harangue against her in these reviews, she is not angry, bitter, or hateful. She simply does not strive to be your mother. I call attention to this because as a professor I have read studies of student evaluations, and I believe that students' expectations of women professors are much like patients' expectations of female doctors: they want nurturers, women who exude empathy and affection, who for all intents and purposes behave like their ideal mother (and perhaps not like their real mother at all). They do not expect this from men, and, indeed, for the very same traits that they lower their ratings of women professors, they honor male professors. Much of the same, I believe, goes on in people's minds when they go to a woman doctor or PA. The brusqueness that they would describe as intelligence and incisiveness in a male doctor or PA, they experience as bitchiness from a woman doctor or PA. That's the way of our world. Female professionals have to live with it and discover ways of dealing with it. Jen is outstanding; she could easily be a doctor if she chose to be. We are the ones who need to examine our preconceptions of how women professionals need to behave.
