UCSF Dental Center

If you have unlimited free time and an exceptional amount of understanding and patience, perhaps you should try this dental clinic. Otherwise, I would urge you to steer clear of it. My mother paid several hundreds of dollars as a deposit towards a procedure that ultimately was never performed. The process of getting a refund has been excruciatingly painful and is still ongoing - it has been OVER 4 MONTHS! She asked me to get in contact with them on her behalf just in case there was a language barrier or miscommunication. I called the billing department several times over the course of many weeks and a wide range of times, and was never able to speak to an actual human being. If you do not get hung up on immediately, you are directed straight to voicemail. I left many messages and not once did anyone call me back. I finally called the general line in hopes of getting some form of assistance. I explained my situation in detail, and the person on the line literally sighed and said "Have you tried contacting the billing department?". Um, yes? That's what I have been doing and what I just tried to very calmly explain to you. (Needless to say, I was no longer calm at this point). I asked her if there was ANY other option or person I could speak to for assistance, but she cut me off and said she would transfer me to the billing department. Before I even had a chance to say anything, the call was transferred. Of course, as we all expect by now, it went straight to their voicemail. Hah. I am generally not an unkind person. With the pandemic going on, and assuming that they are probably short staffed and overworked, I wanted to give them the chance to resolve it on their end. I was trying to avoid having to file a dispute with the credit card company to obtain the refund from them, but this phone call (along with the plain rudeness and blatant lack of sympathy & care) was the last straw. Regarding the actual dental procedures, it's hit or miss depending on which student doctor you get. You roll the dice. It's sad because I would really like to support the student dentists in furthering their education, but the service from the staff is a major turn off and makes it not worth it...

Having gone to Arthur Dugoni, I can now compare the two. I would say that at UCSF I was treated like a human being and a patient and that the staff cared about saving my teeth and took my input into consideration. On the other hand, at the Dugoni clinic I was treated like a project and a test subject and a training grounds--they made me feel irrelevant and dispensable and they didn't care about my concerns at all. I was just a means to an end. My student dentist was Dr. Sarkisov and I liked him a lot. He took pains not to hurt me and he always listened and adapted things to make me comfortable. I liked how he was passionate about the science of dentistry and how the treatment I recieved included me, if that makes sense. Unfortunately, I did have a falling out with the school because my treatment dragged on for so long and some errors were made that caused me to suffer unnecessarily and lose confidence in the school. That said, they did call me multiple times trying to make things right and to help alleviate my pain. I appreciate that they continued to care and try to solve the problem. Unlike Dugoni, which tries to build its reputation with fancy looking clinics, at UCSF I think they try and build their reputation by actually taking care of patients. Although things did turn sour, I always felt bad about it because I did not intend for it to reflect badly on my student dentist Dr. Sarkisov. I tried to make that clear when I talked to upper management. He was reallt such a nice and competent guy. My student dentist actually tried to convey the critical nature of my situation to his superiors and I observed how they sometimes brushed off or trivialized his concerns. I don't think it was his fault at all and I hope that it didn't come across that way. Anyway, I would not recommend coming here if you're not willing to take the chance that your condition will worsen and require more serious and expensive treatment because the process is very slow to actually get work done. However, they do not over diagnose you and they do everything to save your teeth. It's crowded and claustrophobic inside the treatment area and there is no privacy, so you might be embarrassed to look at other patients in the eye after an appointment, especially if you've got some medical problems that you never speak out loud. That part bothers me because there is a lack of confidentiality that normally exists in doctors' offices. I don't feel comfortable with everyone around knowing how many cavities I have or what medication I take on the regular basis. I also don't feel comfortable discussing all of my dental isssues knowing that other patients can listen in. It reminds me of the time I was in the ER at the hospital in a room where patients were divided into stalls using sliding curtains. The guy next to me was getting a catheter inserted. I could hear everything he was told and everything he said up to the final moment when they inserted the catheter and he asked, "When can I take it out?!" And the doctor replied, "You don't. It has to stay from now on," and the guy broke down crying. I shouldn't have heard that interaction and if the guy wasn't suffering like crazy, the lack of privacy would have surely bothered him as well. But I digress..

Miss Kai and miss cho will be great doctors one day, whoever hires them will have the best picks to dentistry! Precise and takes time to make sure done correctly. We need more doctors and students alike as these two

We chose UCSF as the location to have our first child. After 14 hours of labor, the doctor told us to get ready to push and walked out. Five minutes later a doctor we'd never seen before told us that my wife had to have a c-section, and thus began our ordeal at UCSF Medical Center. Without going into all the details I'll just touch on the highlights: •They did not give my wife the proper amount of anesthetic and sensation returned mid surgery. •Once my son was born and wheeled off to the NICU I was more or less ignored by staff there and not told what was going on, what was wrong or what they were doing, and more or less pushed out of the way with no information. • My wife contracted an antibiotic resistant staff infection which almost killed her, and required rehospitalization • Once she was rehospitalized and I was splitting time between home and her bed side, we were told that I couldn't leave our son in the room with her since he'd been discharged and had to lug our newborn home to walk the dog 3 times a day. • I contracted an antibiotic resistant respiratory infection that took more than a month to clear. • While some staff was helpful and courteous, some staff was downright aweful with one nurse telling my wife, who had had a c-section and was hospitalized with a resistant staff infection to get up and do it herself, when she asked for help cleaning her breast pump. In short, DO NOT HAVE YOUR CHILD HERE! Go somewhere else, have it at home, anyplace but here! Please note the maternity ward has since moved to Mission Bay my review still stands

FIRST REVIEW I HAVE EVER WRITTEN AT AGE 35. And I am a laid back. Poor dental work. Absolute zoo. Lost my Covid test results for my tooth extraction. Teeth cleaning and examine took 4 hours. People are packed into the center during Covid with about 1 foot distancing. Professors seem very uninterested. Price is not discounted by much. I’m not disgruntled. Want to save you money and time. They big business with zero compassion.