Wow, I've been around the block quite a few times now across the Bay Area healthcare system, caring…read morefor my multi-generational family, and Dr. Ruiz is sure a winner--he really takes the cake! If there were a way to request my money back from Pacific Rheumatology Associates, I would. So come take a ride of absurdity with us... and Dr. Ruiz will take you all the back to "The Sixth Sense"!
When Dr. Ruiz first walked in, I mentioned that we had a few questions for him that I'd neatly typed out and enumerated in advance to facilitate the conversation, along with a set of relevant records that I'd brought. He didn't even glance at the questions or the records--or pretend to. This was a first even among the many harried UCSF doctors whom our family has seen. (At one point later, he exclaimed, "I don't see the MRI!" I then directed him to the MRI report in the records that we had carefully printed out and brought... that he had in turn ignored two minutes earlier.)
We'd come to him with two presenting issues, possibly related. He asked about the first one, and every time I tried to explain Issue #2 by IDing the multiple joints that had been impacted, he would revert back to the Issue #1. In other words, he never even made space for us to discuss 50% of the symptoms--a master of a detailed intake, no doubt.
We'd gone in asking for a second opinion, especially re: Issue #2, which had confounded multiple other specialists. He saw that we'd spoken with another rheumatologist, and his overall mien was, "What are you doing here if you already have a diagnosis?" It's as if his brain could not wrap itself around the apparently shocking fact that folks in chronic pain may want to get a second opinion before embarking on an intensive treatment of upwards of $300/month.
He insisted that the treatment for Issue #1--designed to treat arthritis--could solve for Issue #2 if it was also caused by arthritis. "It may not always show up in X-rays. You have to get MRIs."
As we'd mentioned in the questions that I'd shared with him (yes, the ones he refused to review), I explained that we _had_ gotten MRIs (also indicated in the list of questions I'd brought as well as in the records, neither of which he'd reviewed, as I said earlier), and the MRIs revealed no arthritis. So his insistence that an arthritis treatment could solve for the other issues was patently untrue. "Just take the treatment (for Issue #1), and then you'll know if they're related!"
Exasperated, I tried to ask if at least he had any other hypotheses as to what would be driving the history of bilateral issues and pain that had ensued and never remitted since 2020. He could have just said a straightforward "no," but instead he waxed on impatiently about the arthritis treatment as a diagnostic tool, which we'd already established prior to the conversation. I tried asking again, but his bizarre and dismissive dodging of a remarkably straightforward yes/no question was straight up rude, as if he couldn't be bothered with a patient question.
About 7 or 8 minutes in, I gave up on gleaning any scintilla of value from our conversation with Dr. Ruiz. He then stepped out of the room and came back with a couple of brochures and a printout of the condition--information that any third grader with reading skills and a laptop could have found online. Out of politeness, I thanked him nonetheless for the zero value he had provided. (In retrospect, I'm not sure why I was thanking him for treating us with dismissiveness and impatience in the 8 minutes that our health insurance company and we will have paid in the upper hundreds for.)
Then--and, oh, this has got to be the BEST part, everybody--he just walked out of the room. Wordlessly.
No "you're welcome." No "have a great day." Not even a mere "bye" or a wave. It was as if we suddenly no longer existed, and he could not be bothered to lower his jaw to utter a syllable to at least acknowledge our presence and signal his departure. In the decades that we've been working with doctors, this was a first! It was very "The Sixth Sense": We'd suddenly become Bruce Willis, and he was definitely not Haley Joel Osment. The effort it would have taken to eke out this baseline level of civility apparently was far too overwhelming.
Needless to say, the way he treated us was rude, dismissive, and borderline unprofessional. I would recommend seeing him as much as I would recommend getting a root canal--except the root canal would probably prove more useful.