I was drawn to this place because I appreciated the idea of a cats only veterinary clinic, as so often I feel many vets are very dog care centric and cats are treated as an afterthought. And so I gave this practice quite a few chances, wanting it to work out. I believe the people here mean well, and many of the staff can be friendly. But unfortunately, meaning well is just not enough when it comes to medical care.
This may be a fine vet for routine checkups for a lot of cats and their owners, so I can understand the high ratings being reflective of that being the majority of visits. But if your cat has any sort of different situation, either an illness or more complex medical situation, or if your cat doesn't do well with vet visits in general, then this vet really falls short of providing quality care.
I feel their practice is too protocol oriented, too focused on being efficient and not enough on a more intuitive kind of care that understands the psychology of each individual cat and their needs. This is a going trend in medical care in general, for humans as well. I have come to see this kind of standardization of care as trading off quality of care for quantity, and it lacks a human element that is sorely needed in today's world. Some of the staff seem to lack experience with handling cats - I cringe when I see veterinary nurses not even able to get a cat out of a corner and pick them up properly. It is not difficult to not trigger a cat's defenses, you just have to have an understanding of what cats are responsive to. So I suppose I would like to trust that my vet can handle my cat at least as well as I can, and I don't think that should be too much to expect. I believe this inexperienced handling leads to them needing to compensate for the resulting "difficulties" the cat is giving them by overprescribing medicine like gabapentin, just to be able to collect simple bloodwork.
This personally happened to me - my cat has never needed gabapentin to get blood work done before. But it was prescribed to her the night before her appointment. The dose (which I later realized was the same I had been once prescribed post surgery - a human scale dose) totally incapacitated my cat and made her legs collapse beneath her and walk sideways. I had to safeguard my house so she didn't hurt herself on my very steep steps. It was a very frightening experience and they didn't warn me beforehand about any such potential effects. They told me afterwards that I could open the capsule and dump half out to reduce the dose. It would have been nice to know beforehand. Even if this dose was technically the "normal" dose to prescribe, some discernment really should have been used for my cats weight, condition, age, and the fact that she had never been on gabapentin before and therefore had no tolerance. This is the kind of protocol oriented, by the book lack of tailored and sensible treatment that I am talking about. Perhaps one size all works for many patients, but for the ~10% it doesn't, it really - really - doesn't work and could even be dangerous in certain situations.
This vet ended up caring more about me potentially holding them liable for being dissatisfied with their care, than they did about making anything right. I am not sure what triggered them to ultimately make this decision, as I was only writing to them about issues my cat was having with the dose of medicine prescribed. I had no such intention nor did I express any inclination to hold them accountable in any way, I was just a concerned pet owner. They discontinued seeing me as a patient during a time where my cat had just been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism and needed her prescription filled. They had apparently sent the notification by mail that they were ending their patient-client relationship with me, which I never received. I had to find out the hard way when I tried to get this prescription filled and they denied it. After I contacted them, they came to their senses and provided the refill so that they did not impede my cat's treatment.
