Dr. Annmarie Stillwell Staten Island is BARBARIC
If any of you in Staten Island are seeking a pain management doctor, do yourself a HUGE favor and stay far away from Dr. Anne Marie Stilwell's office on McClean Avenue (South Beach area off Fr. Capodanno Boulevard). In a nutshell, I saw her as a new patient early last summer and was simply treated as though I was a street person type drug addict. Why? Because upon her nurse practitioner's asking me what pain medications I'd taken in the past and if any had resulted in negative side effects, I replied by running down the list of everything I'd been prescribed previously and that of all these medications, the only one that seemed to work at all without making me ill (sometimes violently sick) was percocet (I even presented her with the bottle that the referring doctor had given me the week before). She was insistent that something called Ultram would be better and sufficient. Two days later and into 50-plus hours of violent illness (blurred vision, vomiting, shakes, heart palpitations, fever, chills) I called the office back and it took them 2 days to call me back and upon my return I AGAIN saw the nurse practitioner. I explained to her (after she tried to push a lidocaine patch on me to shut me up - knowing that was on the list of medications that did not work the first time) that I could not afford to "experiment" with things that may not work for me since I had been out of work for over at year and had been suffering until this point when I obtained medical insurance; she very condescendingly replied "ok...so,...what were you doing for the pain this whole time?" (as though I was prostituting myself or something). My immediate and direct reply to her was "SUFFERING"!! She then gave me (and I quote) "an emergency supply of percocet" which was enough for 5 days and barely did anything more than aspirin due to the low dosage (as though she was doing me a favor). On my way out before leaving the parking lot, two other people grabbed my ear only to tell me that they had almost identical experiences with this woman and that they refused to see anyone but the doctor herself due to the rudeness and attitude of her understudy. To put the final nail in the coffin, upon obtaining a copy of my file to bring to the next pain management doctor I sought after this wretched experience, I read through it and saw that the nurse practitioner entered in the "comments" area that "patient came in demanding percocet". If that isn't being treated like something I'd scrape out from under my shoe, I don't know what is.
She works under Dr. Stillwell and her last name is Ricciardi. I even went so far as to file a formal written complaint form (obtained from the NY State Licensing Board itself) against her. If you had a similar experience, please do so as well. It's only 2 pages and can be obtained online.
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