One of the friendliest and warmest doctors I have ever encountered. He treated me with compassion and truly cared about me and my family. One of the best bedside manners of any doctors I have ever received treatment from.

Submitted Sept. 4, 2017

Doctor High on Self-Importance
I took my mom in to see Dr. Sadiq because her liver enzymes had been steadily increasing for a year. My mom had initially seen him four years prior (with someone else as the translator since I was living in a different state at the time). Within the first minute of talking to us, the doctor tells us not to waste his time if my mom's not going to do what he recommends. Why's that? Apparently, since my mom did not do the endoscopy/colonoscopy he had recommended four years earlier, he didn't think she was worthy of his time again. So that means a patient doesn't have the right to be re-evaluated?

He said this to us not once but twice, just in case we didn't hear the first time. When I asked him a clarifying question about whether or not my mom had to do both the endoscopy and the colonoscopy or if she had the choice to just do one, he said, "You have to do both...you can't just pick and choose whatever you want! If you don't want to do what I recommend, then don't waste my time!" Oh, so as my mom's translator I can't ask questions to more clearly convey information to her without being reprimanded like a bothersome child?

At that point, I explained to him that we were obviously there this time around to see what his suggestions were anew. That's not too much to ask after 4 years have passed. Given the constant state of inflammation in my mom's liver in the past year, she went into this appointment willing to have the endos/colons. procedures done; she just did not want to have a biopsy. But Dr. Sadiq was too annoyed about her non-compliance years ago that he thought it was okay to be a bully. Listen doc--situations change, people change, and new decisions are made as a result. It's called life; we live and learn.

It's not acceptable for a doctor to take such an unyielding stance when he doesn't even care to hear the voice of the patient in real time. No doctor is so important that he can talk to people that way. If he had even taken the effort to speak cordially to me rather than arrogantly, he would have known that I was in agreement with him, not against him (I was obviously there to help guide my mom into making the best choices for her health and she trusts me in that regard).

A word of advice to Dr. Sadiq and other doctors who view themselves with a disproportionate amount of self-importance: Don't think your time is so much more important than that of your patients that you can't even attempt to be compassionate, offering a measure of grace to those who are not always ready to jump on your suggestions at first mention. A grounding dose of humility would also go a long way. These are the traits that separate great doctors with mediocre ones no matter how skillful they may be.

Submitted Oct. 10, 2014