I scheduled an appointment for allergy testing, telling the woman on the phone that I'd had hives for almost a month and that antihistamines weren't working. When I got there, I waited nearly an hour without any acknowledgment of or apology that I'd been waiting for so long, and, in the meantime, the woman at the desk (who still had my insurance card and was supposed to be verifying my insurance coverage) was taking personal calls and texting on her cell phone. When I finally asked what was going on, she said she couldn't verify my insurance, so I took the phone to talk to the insurance company myself and realized that she'd called the wrong number. I have a student insurance plan and my card very clearly lists the phone number for providers to call, but she ignored this and called whatever number the office had on file, even though it's well known that student insurance often operates completely separately from "regular" insurance divisions. So now, an hour past my appointment time, I'm just going through intake and checked in by a nurse and being asked a bunch of questions about my history and current condition. I am then left waiting in this room for a while before they move me to another room so they can do intake for another patient and then I'm moved back into the original room so the doctor can see another patient who arrived after me and then eventually I'm moved back into the second room to wait yet another bit of time until the doctor is ready to see me. Finally, an hour and forty-five minutes after my scheduled appointment time, the doctor comes in and asks me 'how are you?' I tell him that I'm pretty frustrated because I've been waiting such a long time. He doesn't react or respond to this and then asks 'so why are we here today?' What was the point of me going through my patient history and current issues with the nurse if he wasn't even going to look at it before coming to talk to me? When I point out my hives to him, he says 'those aren't hives, those are scars' as if he knows more about my condition than I do, and then starts talking about referring me to a dermatologist and completely disregarding the issue at hand. When I attempt to redirect him back to the hives issue, he tells me to calm down. If I hadn't been so desperate to deal with this issue, I would have walked out right then. Soon enough, I find out that I can't even get the allergy tests done because I'd been taking antihistamines and the hives were currently active. I express to him that I wish I'd been told that before driving an hour to his clinic just to wait nearly two hours to be told that he can't do anything for me, and I ask him why the woman I'd scheduled my appointment with hadn't told me about these allergy testing restrictions. He said that there's no reason for them to have known. So not only was there no apology for my wait time and for having wasted my time, but my frustrations were completely invalidated by him. If you are someone in charge of scheduling appointments at an allergy clinic, where people often get allergy testing done, there is absolutely a reason for you to know that you should give patients a heads up that testing cannot be done if they have taken antihistamines or had an active allergic reaction! Eventually, he starts writing a prescription for an epi-pen for me and walks me through how and when to administer it. Because my job involves teaching people how to use epi-pens, I know that 1) my condition does not require an epi-pen, 2) that epi-pens cost about $700, and 3) that if you administer an epi-pen, you must to go to the ER immediately. However, the doctor acknowledged and addressed none of this. He said nothing about needing to go the ER and had no clue how much an epi-pen ends up costing patients. (I'm really thankful that I knew this before, because if I didn't I would have ended up inappropriately self-administering a large dose of epinephrine and wasting that $700 and would have had to go to the ER and pay probably a few thousand dollars for that and then I would have been in the exact position I was in leaving the clinic) And on top of the epi-pen prescription, he told me to take antihistamines, completely ignoring the fact that I'd told him that antihistamines were not working. I ended up leaving the clinic having wasted three hours of my day and in the same position I'd been with my condition when I walked in.
The first doctor I went to after Dr. Parker knew immediately what my condition was and how to treat it. He mentioned that it's a very common condition and was shocked when I told him about my experience with Dr. Parker and that I'd been prescribed an epi-pen.
Based on my experience at this clinic, Dr. Parker and his staff are rude, inconsiderate, and clearly do not have the knowledge that should be expected of people that work in this field. read more
