Stanford Integrative Medicine Center

I’m generally a big fan of Stanford Hospital and Clinics. This clinic, like others at Stanford, is clean, has a professional support staff and provides very good medical care. I’ve come here to see Dr. Wong for acupuncture and my biggest complaint is that I really hate talking to him. He makes a lot of inappropriate comments to the patient. For instance, he’s asked me everything from how much money I used to make to why I don’t just go get myself a boyfriend. It’s extremely unprofessional at best and deeply offensive at worst. I think it might well be a cultural thing. A lot of Chinese medical professionals who are not MDs and who are trained in China have a tendency to be extremely nosy and way less professional toward their patients. However, given that Dr. Wong is affiliated with Stanford, not with in some hole in the wall in Chinatown, he really should behave with the usual standards of a Stanford medical professional.
With that said, he clearly knows his stuff and has good skills. He’s been a practitioner of Chinese medicine for a long time and is not one of those hippies who just decided to get into acupuncture to go find himself. But even then, I regularly got the sense that he held back his medical expertise for treating my problems and made very little effort to figure out the full extent and nature of my pain. My impression was that he did the bare minimum he needed to do and no more.