When the reviews started naming my family
This account was submitted by a healthcare provider and de-identified before publication. Details that could identify a patient or practice have been removed, and it is shared with the provider’s consent.
An individual left repeated reviews that started as a care complaint and steadily shifted into personal hostility, at one point including comments about my family that had no business in a review of an emergency visit. The posts followed me across a second site, which made it feel inescapable.
Emergency medicine already runs at a high emotional temperature, and this made an already hard job feel unsafe. I could not respond in any way that would not risk disclosing details about the encounter, so the platform's reply function was useless to me.
My sleep deteriorated to the point that I recognized in myself the exact symptoms I would have flagged in a patient, and I eventually cut back my clinical hours partly to protect my own health. It is a hard thing to admit that anonymous reviews contributed to stepping back from work I love.
I documented the pattern carefully and consulted an attorney about the comments that veered toward threatening, but was told they mostly fell within the platform's tolerance for opinion.