Comment by kbp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbp | Hacker News Reader

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> Leave a single note, "We're sorry this patient wasn't satisfied with our service, and have refunded all fees. Since most of our patients are happy, we rarely need to do this." [0] Actually even that note is too confrontational

She accused him of committing felonious fraud; seeing the doctor respond by giving her her money back and saying "most people don't have a problem" would not cast that doctor in a good light at all, to me. I'm not really sure if there's any kind of response they could have left that would feel reassuring to me: recommending the client contact law enforcement like someone else suggested might help a little, but not that much. The presence of a review with accusations like that that the doctor shrugged off or dealt with casually would be infinitely more offputting to me than hearing the doctor had previously won a libel case against a former client.

Let's stipulate that there is nothing the physician could say in response to a fraud accusation that would cause you personally to doubt that accusation. That seems a novel combination of the judgmental and the credulous, but life takes all sorts. It would still be better for the physician, for you to have this reaction while reading Yelp than for hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers to be reading TFA.

The longterm difference seems pretty minimal to me: they google his name and see reviews accusing him of fraud or they google his name and see tabloid articles about this story that say the same thing the reviews did, but add that the person making the accusations was sued for libel, alongside followup reports that the court decided the woman was lying. In the second case, the bad reports jump out more, but they're accompanied with notes that a court decided they were false, whereas with your Yelp responses the doctor wasn't even denying them. I don't think your approach is obviously better for the doctor when someone's looking up reviews of him in 5 years.

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