LasikPlus is a prime example of why MBAs have NO business in medicine.
To be fair, the support staff were friendly and there was coffee/tea in the waiting room. The positives end there.
I've never met a horrible optometrist until this visit. Dr. Dharia / Aesha was dismissive, rude, impatient, and borderline racist. While shining bright lights into my dilated eyes, she demands that I open my eyes when they're clearly watering, and I'm trying to shut them. Nope. Instead of giving me a minute to adjust, she holds my eyelids open with her bare hands, at one point slipping and jamming her finger into my eye, without asking if it was okay to touch my face/eyes at all. You'd think as an "experienced" optometrist, she'd have better bedside manner.
She made no attempt to hide the frustration in her voice. At the end of the exam / being manhandled, she verbatim says "you're eyes are really really really small." This is incredibly racially insensitive. My eyes are perfectly fine when you aren't jamming your fingers into them, thanks. Instead of insulting me, she could have said "in the unlikely event that the lid speculum does not fit your eye, the ophthalmologist will need to perform PRK."
Since her assistant had engaged in small talk during the first exam, when Dr. Dharia asked what my husband and I were doing this weekend, I answered "oh, we're probably going hiking." Little did I know that all of the "small talk" this office engages in is noted down in your file and then promptly used against you at the earliest opportunity. Dr. Dharia proceeded to follow up with "ok so you can come in on Saturday for the surgery then. You have no weekend plans."
Since I see mostly fine with my right eye, I asked about just having surgery on my left. Instead of answering my question, Dr. Dharia just said "nobody does that, the last person who tried just ended up having both eyes done anyway".
Well, since Dr. Dharia, supposedly the most medically qualified person on site, wasn't going to answer my question, I resorted to asking the front-desk assistant, who attempted to start an explanation, only to be cut off by Dr. Dharia, who said again "the last person who tried just ended up having both eyes done anyway". I also had to ask the assistant for my current vision prescription. The assistant also attempted to refuse to give that information to me until I pressed him further. Something is seriously wrong when the front-desk assistant can tell you more about your vision than the optometrist.
Dr. Dharia repeatedly pushed me to book the Saturday appointment. It felt like I was being interrogated at one point. My vision is not a car I'm buying off a lot, and even then I'd need time to think before plopping down $5,000 for someone to slice open my eyes. This is an ELECTIVE SURGERY, so there should be no pressure to get it done asap. I'm not going to die if I don't get it this weekend, or ever.
To summarize the appointment experience, you sign in, follow an assistant in who will do most of the eye exam to determine whether you qualify for LASIK, then are handed a tablet on which they play an eerily dystopian video where a bunch of ophthalmologists tell you about how much they care while holding their hands over their hearts. Other patients are sitting in the same area, all watching the same video on tablets. Once the video is done, the optometrist does a few more tests and then conducts a high-pressure sales pitch and doesn't mean it at all when she says she's happy to answer any questions you may have.
You do not meet your surgeon/ophthalmologist until the day of your surgery, probably as a cost-cutting / profit-maximizing measure.
It's important to note that most of LasikPlus' 5-star reviews come from accounts that have written a total of 2 or fewer Yelp reviews.
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