My family is writing this truthful review with a heart full of pain and sadness hoping to stop the potential tragedy for any individual or family who is even thinking to have Dr. John Chiu perform the so called "minimally invasive spine surgeries" at California Spine Institute. The life of our most beloved father has altered completely as a result of these procedures performed by Chiu. He became handicapped. Do not let the all smiles Dr. Chiu deceive and mislead you like he did to our father. Like one of the other reviewer suggested, you can search for Dr. John Chiu on the official website of California Medical Board and review three disciplinary case decisions by the Board regarding his outrageous and negligent conducts.
Our father was referred to Dr. Chiu sometime in 2012 after a horrible 18-wheeler truck accident. Our father had been a professional truck driver for more than 30 years and before then, he was in great shape- physically and emotionally strong and healthy. He sustained back injuries during the accident and was experiencing lower back pain.
When our father first consulted Chiu at this facility, Chiu immediately and aggressively started a brainwashing process by persuading our father that the only option to solve his lower back pain was to have a minimally invasive procedure. Chiu gave no explanations as to why the procedure was indeed needed, what exactly would be done during the procedure, and what could be the potential risks in having such procedure. He made his procedures sound like a piece of cake to our father. Our father was a Chinese immigrant and he was so naïve and took in his doctor's words like an obedient child believing it was the only option he had back then. From 2012 to 2015, our father underwent three minimally invasive spine surgeries done by Chiu. After the third procedure, his back pain became so excruciating and constant and he couldn't walk at all. No physical therapy was done or recommended by Chiu throughout these years.
At that time, our family realized the situation was becoming so wrong. We decided for our father to have a secondary expert evaluating his conditions. The second surgeon was a well respected surgeon in the state and after hearing our story, he felt so truly sorry for our father. At one time, he even said to our family that Chiu is outrageous and it is a shame to have a doctor like Dr. Chiu in their profession. He told us Dr. Chiu clearly took advantage of our father by making him undergo three procedures and those were sham procedures. It was emotionally painful to have our thoughts and feelings about Dr. Chiu confirmed by an expert in this profession. In order to fix our father's back pain, our second surgeon performed two major spine surgeries on our father in 2015 and 2016. The first one was a spinal decompression and second one was fusion at three levels L-2-L3, L3-L-4, L4-L5. Our father recovered well after these two surgeries. His back pain was finally gone. We thought at last that was a happy ending.
Six months after his spinal fusion surgery in 2016, he started to experience extreme and constant lower right leg numbness, weakness and radiating pain. As a result of this, he underwent a 6th revision surgery for further spinal decompression and we were told one level of his spine fusion didn't fuse. So the surgeon had to correct the fusion at this specific. Our father just had a 6th surgery in the span of five years, yesterday on November 21, 2017.
Lying on his hospital bed and regretting the wrong decisions in believing Dr. Chiu years ago, which led to his current physical condition, our father is asking us to write this review and share his private and personal experience with all the others who are thinking to have minimally invasive spine surgery with Chiu. Our father is 61 and the rest of his life is destroyed. Do not let our tragedy happen to you. Our father suffered physically and became disabled and our family suffered a great deal of emotional pain all because of what Chiu did. He is a true disgrace to our race. His doctor license should be taken away from him so the next patient won't be deceived and plagued. There is is no doubt in our mind that Dr. Chiu is going straight to hell for what he has done as a doctor to our father and his other innocent patients. read more
