Eye Surgeons Offering Discounts for your YouTube Testimonials Now - Would you Bite?
Possessing a skill, a talent, is a wonderful thing. Finding a way to make your talent work for you is another thing altogether. You would think that doctors and surgeons, of all people, would never have to worry about getting a steady gig, being in demand. We keep hearing about how the doctors in this country are just swamped with patients. That is really true of doctors at hospitals where insurance cover pays for treatment; it is less true of elective treatment - laser eye surgery, Botox and the like. Eye surgeons for instance, need to work hard on getting the word-of-mouth going in all the traditional ways, on their expertise and their skill if they want to keep their business afloat.
Take a popular Beverly Hills eye surgeon for instance, who has a great hand on the new Lasek eye surgery procedure. Every satisfied patient he treats, he gives them a video of their surgery to watch at home. The hope here is, that his patients will be so pleased with the way their eyesight turned out, that they would use the video they get, to post on the Internet with a great review of the doctor's abilities. And if they do this, they get a bonus - either a discount on the eye surgery that costs thousands of dollars, or a free cosmetic procedure of their choice. Does it seem unseemly that respected surgeons would stoop to begging for free publicity, or worse, paying for it?
This is the brave new world where even a serious and respectable eye surgeon has to go about barking for patients "Step right up!". In fact, this is been done for quite a while - doctors and surgeons have long recruited patients for their testimonials, sometimes they go on TV on infomercials too. However, most professional surgeons' bodies will prohibit them from actually paying for those testimonials. But now, it is clear that while actual cash doesn't change hands, plenty of discounts and freebies actually do. When satisfied patients will go public with how happy they are with their larger breasts, their straighter noses or their whiter teeth, that's somewhat okay. It's just that when it comes to eye surgeons getting on the bandwagon, it gets a little upsetting.
YouTube and Yahoo are replete with thousands of videos, with testimonials of patients raving about great cosmetic surgery or how wonderful their eye surgeons are. Is it really fair, and can we really trust them, when we know that they are being compensated one way or another? At least, they don't try to look authentic, by putting out poor quality video with jerky motion and ambient noise, the way some infomercials do, to make you think that there is no 'acting' going on. These are polished productions with background music. Usually, the doctors really don't see that there is anything unethical going on. If patients have to pay $4500 for a Lasek operation, and they get maybe $500 off for their YouTube cooperation, is that really bad enough to influence anyone unfairly?
But patients keep wondering - if they don't go along with this whole thing, will they be treated well the next time they come in for an appointment? This kind of pressure is completely unfair. And anyway, those glowing testimonials have no chance of being completely truthful. They put those videos up even before the patient has had a chance to heal, and actually feel all those wonderful sentiments. When money becomes involved in something, sooner or later there's bound to be a compromise and ethics somewhere. But then who's to say that doctors don't compromise on ethics when there is no money involved - because they just lost interest in something that pays less well?