Proof a review on real self is fake and that the patient has been lying has been sent to Real self, however real self don't even appear to have looked at the information. Real self just reply that the reviewer is responsible for their review and they will take it down if they want it taking down. The patient has stated to us they want £5000 to remove the review which contains false information not just about their surgery and care, but also the doctors status with medical boards, when they only paid £2200 for their surgery. Therefore in our opinion, real self are being used by the patient to blackmail the surgeon which is against their own code of conduct but still the review is not being investigated by real self. The patient has stated that the surgeon has left a medical board due to the number of bad cases about them where in fact they have left via voluntary easure due to not working in the UK any more. The patient has lied about life threatening infection and necrosis. They have been in hospital for 1 day but their is no evidence from this 1 day that they nearly died, had necrosis or where stitched up not correctly as the patient has written in the review.Its always sad when patients do get an infection but its not a reason or excuse to ask for twice as much money as their surgery or write lies on the internet about their results or a doctors status with medical boards. There are lots of posts on their site which relate to the doctors medical board that are not true but when when a lawyer write to the site to show the evidence they write back that under Washington state law they are not responsible for the reviews, only the reviewer is responsible?
This company don't follow their own code of conduct and are allowing the pubic to be given false and fake information and allowing surgeons to be harassed and blackmailed in my opinon. I am an admin assistant who is trying to help the surgeon with this. The level of stress I seem by surgeon go through as a result of real self is unbelievable. Freedom of speech is totally different than posting lies on the internet a then asking for £5000 to remove the lies, in my opinion. If the reviewer had just written about her own care then maybe their an excuse. But to state he had loads of cases at the GMC and that he left because of this, when its just not true and he left because of voluntary because he no longer works in the UK and does not need to be in the UK GMC, is just lying to try and gain money.
They say they follow their 'code of conduct' and terms of service but from my experience even when a barrister contacts them providing information and evidence that the reviewer has lied they don't look at the information. They don't delete the review and write back stating they are not responiable for the review and it would only be removed if a court case states it should be or the reviewer states its ok to take it down. Well the reviewer told us she will take it down for £5000 to delete her lies! And we not paying her to remove lies.

Edit: RealSelf has requested the removal of this review with subtle threatening undertones of libel so I will clarify a few things. If someone is not allowed to share extremely negative but true information about a doctor listed on their site without having that information removed, while RealSelf may be right that it violates their terms and conditions for posting, it still allows that information to be hidden from prospective patients. Therefore since RealSelf facilitates the removal of negative content about this doctor whilst leaving behind all glowing reviews, it has all the appearances of "covering up" his transgressions. Dr. Dry has had a patient who died, RealSelf will not let this be displayed. It looks like a "cover up" but I do not accuse RealSelf of such. I believe I am legally allowed an opinion *sarcasm however and that opinion is this is not a trustworthy site and I stand behind my recommendation of not trusting them until I see that doctor removed.

Original post:

I continuously tried to warn other prospective patients about a doctor Gavin M. Dry, listed with high reviews who is a convicted drug addict and has killed a patient. RealSelf continuously deletes my posts. They contain no profanity, simply asking people to read this doctors convictions and listing them as I have below. DO NOT TRUST THIS SITE

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/kirkland-plastic-surgeon-agrees-pay-*******-settle-dea-drug-diversion-claims

http://komonews.com/archive/dr-still-practicing-after-writing-hundreds-of-fake-prescriptions

http://www.skyvalleychronicle.com/FEATURE-NEWS/SEATTLE-AREA-TV-PERSONALITY-PLASTIC-SURGEON-AGREES-TO-PAY-FINE-TO-SETTLE-DEA-DRUG-DIVERSION-CLAIMS-*******

http://kboi2.com/news/local/washington-state-takes-action-against-two-plastic-surgeons

http://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1500/NewsReleases/2015/15-179-DisciplineNewsRelease.pdf

A couple of months ago, I posted a review of a very bad outcome from a particular surgery, which included clear photos of the problem area. It immediately attracted comments from people who were considering the same doctor for the same procedure. Less than a week later, it was pulled from Realself and my account was promptly banned with no explanation provided by Realself staff members.

Prior to this, a Realself staff member banned another patient who had been victimized by the same doctor and locked her review so that users could no longer comment beneath her updates. Realself's justification was that she "had an agenda against the doctor" - something which is to be expected when you pay a great deal of money for a botched job. Although she can no longer access her account, they are still in possession of her review and photos. Presumably, these personal struggles are continuing to attract a healthy amount of visitor traffic to the site (read: money), which Realself are shamelessly exploiting by geolocating visitors and bombarding them with "helpful" commercial ads for "doctors near them".

Realself also locked a review from a patient who sustained horrific third degree burns from liposuction. Realself's justification was that her review "centred too much on her legal case", or something to that effect. I read the same review and counted no more than one mention of legal recourse. I have since come across stories on other plastic surgery forums from people who've had their Realself reviews taken down, and found their accounts banned.

Indeed, Realself are doing their very best to stamp out the most grisly and off-putting horror jobs from these so-called Board Certified doctors with jumped up egos and more money than skill, instead spouting out platitudinous tripe about maintaining "a friendly online environment" while throwing a sizeable proportion of its userbase under the bus and hoping that no-one notices.

Nowadays, Realself are funnelling dollars acquired from butchered patients clicking on ads for bad doctors to Realself-sponsored "medical aid" tours in Third World countries. Even though this is nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy to make Realself appear far more wholesome and wonderful than it really is, offering a lifeline to people who are too poor to afford medical care is a worthy cause. However, the problem lies in the uncomfortably ironic truth: that Realself's "medical aid" tours are being bankrolled by people in the First World clicking on doctors' ads and posting traffic-generating horror stories showing clear evidence of physical butchery.

All the while, Realself's policies remain incredibly lenient towardsthe one post wonder reviews and shills that populate the site. My former doctor has an active shill on Realself who's been hard at work for the best part of a year. Her job is to post his name and website links wherever she can get away with it, and direct users back to her review so that they can see her "amazing" results for themselves. She regularly solicits private messages and continually "updates" her review with the same photos and parts of the same story so that it remains at the top of the list in that particular category. She had surgery long ago and it's obvious she's not legit.

Realself's Terms of Service are vague and unenforceable. This gives them carte blanche to make up the rules as they go along, silencing honest members who forfeit their privacy and post proof of bad results in order to help others. Recently, Realself have taken to re-appropriating their dishonest commercial gains in the most cynical ways possible. But if the site wants to survive, it needs to closely examine its exploitative business model before it loses all credibility and is superseded by a better rival.

DONT WRITE/SUPPORT ON REALSELF.COM,, A full marketing scam, i hate ppl who uses non profitable just to ensure their position in market... few question to be answered if any realself can answer, why any negative comment or review/blog is deleted immdetiley if they think its unappropriate as the comments are against doctors who are funding them not using false language though on that comment, also i have prove they charge money from various orgainzation, ofcourse donation is one word to describe it. You think ppl are idiots,
As realself policy is not to delete any thread, if customer wants to edit his own comment, one cannot do it, by this they always have fake data or expired info. For eg 2years back i have posted a review and then i deleted my account, so still now the comment is there and thousands of people rely on that comment which is old, any comment should have validity for eg doctor died, circumsatnces changes, etc but there, its like you are writing on stone, bas****s. I hate these ppl who earns on innocent ppl emotions and call themself realself, they should be banned, some law should come to review their articles or deleting policies. One post can lead to thousands of review maybe its 100yrs old, mayb doctor is died or the hospital or facility want to change their working condition, that means no one have chance to improve, once bad is always bad is their motto, shame on realself, also they will say that you can always update your review, oh realyy what happens if some other people write on my review, my thread goes down again, so you hace to browse /scroll down to see it, lods of ppl dont do that..

BOTCHED! Dr. Gary Brownstein www.cherryhillcosmeticsurgery.com is more interested in his patients money than he is in the welfare of his patients. I paid Dr. Gary Brownstein $7300. 00 for an upper body lift procedure that had to be cancelled as I was diagnosed with ductal carcinoma insitu which is an early stage of breast cancer. I had a procedure with an oncologist where a lump on my breast was removed. After the procedure, Dr. Brownstein has refused to proceed with the upper body lift as he indicates that my cancellation and other mitigating factors cost $7300. 00 even though I have offered him additional funds to cover the cancellation. The topper here is that he has refused to refund my money which was paid in cash. For some reason, he wanted a higher fee if I used a credit card or paid by check so I paid with cash and I do have the receipts! Dr. Brownstein is at www.cherryhillcosmeticsurgery.com Feel free to contact me for further information regarding this money hungry physician. He gets five stars from realself.com because the site is 'fixed'. I gave this same review on there that you see here. It was on realself.com for one week and then pulled!

Real Self as an interesting business model; they have two sides that feed their revenue. One side are patient reviews. These reviews are usually posted soon after a procedure and so a true result is not really known (after all, true results are NOT known right away, especially with procedures such as liposuction). The flow of comments on each person's review or forum comment are confusing as to when they were posted and to which other comment. It's a bad non-intuitive way to post comments.

The other side of Real Self is that it is used as a marketing tool for doctors. So while doctors provide Real Self with the appearance of credibility (which it really has none because there are no physical examinations and all question/answer posts are purely conjecture); Real Self gives doctors the ability to promote themselves through the sheer number of questions they answer. In other words, the more questions a doctor answers, the higher up on the scale they are according to Real Self. This is not the 'star' rating but a Real Self rating (e.g. "TOP" means the doctor has answered a lot of questions; it does not mean that doctor is a top-rated doctor in ability or any other way).

I think this is quite confusing; in fact misleading. Real Self also monitors all interactions on their site, including so-called private messages. That means that they tell you in their terms of use that all content is theirs and that you cannot expect any privacy. IF you post an email to another RS member, you have to realize it is subject to them viewing it.

Real Self has a rule against posting medical advice or links. Or soliciting. Many people on RS post advice and links. However it seems that if you post advice against procedures or links to sites that are also against procedures, one will get a 'warning'. But if one posts links or advice promoting procedures, this will be ignored. It is unclear as to whether it is "okay" with them if one reaches out to another user and says: check out this website! Or would you like to email me, here is my email. Or I think you should NOT get that procedure. And so on.

In the end, one has to remember that 1) RealSelf is a business venture that relies on the cosmetic industry for profit. 2) Doctors rely on RealSelf to promote their businesses. 3) Member reviews are not updated regularly and provide for poor scientific evidence and do not really present real long term results of a procedure. 4) The information on RealSelf is poorly organized and so real information (especially long term results) is not easily available. Most people drop off the site as time goes on and so don't post these results which are more important than immediate results, especially on procedures such a liposuction. 5) users/members often give advice that is not medically appropriate and only based on their own experience which by nature cannot apply to others. 6) Doctor answers (in the Q&A section) have to be suspect since they rely on the site for business and they cannot examine nor take history from the person asking the question. 7) If someone posts a negative review of a procedure, that person is usually told by other members as well as "community managers" (employed by RealSelf) that "things will get better" "just be patient, you'll see" etc. Real problems are rarely addressed. 8) If a member asks a physician about a negative outcome that person is often told it is their own fault (especially in procedures such as liposuction) or bad luck, which ignores scientific evidence. Rarely is the doctor who performed the procedure called out.