Centers of Rehabilitation and Pain Medicine

Unless you want to go to a doctor that is inexperienced and forced to go to a facility that over charges do NOT go to this facility.

To begin with when I called the office I made an appointment with Dr. Lai. The office made an appointment with Dr. Bao Nguyen without telling me I wouldn’t be seeing Dr. Lai. I was irritated at first, when I make an appointment with a specific doctor I expect to see that doctor. Once I started speaking to Dr. Nguyen he seemed knowledgeable enough in his field and the procedure I needed to have done, which I have had done a few times before; he also appeared rather nice.

As we got into the consultation his ego started to show and he started to put down all of the actions of my prior doctor (who had been doing this procedure since it was still relatively unknown). Not only did I find this very unprofessional but Dr. Nguyen didn’t even know my previous doctor and he didn’t have any right to question his work, especially since my old doctor had more knowledge about the procedure that we were discussing than Dr. Nguyen could only hope to achieve one day. He was in and out of the room in less than 15 minutes.

I scheduled a procedure with the surgery center that he is part owner in, his office told me everything was set up, hours before the surgery I found out that my insurance hadn’t approved the procedure. I went back and forth with some of the personnel in Dr. Nguyen’s office only to hear multiple lies; we were finally able to get the procedure scheduled.

Once I got to the surgery center I felt like I was stuck in the back room of a store room. The nurses were fairly nice, the “post-op” nurse was extremely friendly. Once I got in the procedure room was a different story. None of them seemed to know what they were doing and they put me in a position that was so uncomfortable I couldn’t breathe; they said I had to stay that way, that’s how the doctor wanted me. Finally after I was ready to pass out the doctor came in and adjusted me. While the doctor, nurses and techs were setting up Dr. Nguyen was snapping at them the whole time.

I have had this procedure done before and I know that parts of it can be very painful, however, Dr. Nguyen is so inexperienced that not only was I in more pain than I have ever been in before he could only do part of the procedure because he lacked the experience to do the whole procedure.

Tami at Placentia Surgery was the only positive thing in this whole horrible experience.

I then get the bill for the surgery center, it was my fault for not verify whether or not the surgery center was covered under my insurance, but I assumed because he was covered surely the surgery center he was part owner in would be covered. I was wrong. I got a bill for $35,000, that’s after my insurance paid. They said that’s what they charge everybody, it was well over the normal rates for this procedure. They were just trying to get as much money out of my insurance company as they could, unfortunately I can’t prove that’s what they were doing. They did adjust my portion after the fact but it’s still over industry standards. Again more unpleasant people to deal with.