As I said, it's rare to meet a practitioner who creates a reality around his illusions as much as he does. Smoke and mirrors. He does wow people with his "stories", but if you dig a little deeper, you'll find some people are not even close to what they seem.
We all had that "friend" in high school that would constantly talk about his many "adventures" with the members of the opposite sex. It was always that guy that would never shut up about how successful he was with the ladies and all the things he did with them. Then he would be the root every joke when you and your real friends would find out that he was full of hot air and all those "adventures" were nothing more than a figment of his imagination. See where I'm going with this?
Sorry that this is so off the OP's topic, but I couldn't contain myself when Larry's name came up. If he is still asking everyone "What did you do to make yourself bigger today?" while professing to be podiatry's version of the business messiah, his broken record is still turning.
I've been following this site for a long time and finally had to register to jump on this one. I know Dr. Levine and I'd agree that he's not on the top of my list of people to emulate. His course at TUSPM is truly a joke, since he spends most of the time telling everyone how great he is and everything he's done.
Now for the facts. I decided to spend some time with him and so did many of my classmates. Due to our schedule I spent most of my time there on a Saturday.
He brags about having a gazillion offices, but the real deal is that he has about one nice office and a bunch of crappy satellites. Most of his so called offices are clinics owned by the government. He also does tons of nursing homes and house calls. The doctors he has working for him are running all over the place and most of them aren't even working in a real office most of the time. They're in a nursing home, group home, mental health place, government clinic, and so on.
When I shadowed him I was amazed that in today's times, he doesn't wear gloves when working on patients. I watched him take a bottle of lidocaine out of the drawer, open a syringe, clean it with alcohol (at least he did that) and draw the medicine and inject with the same syringe, something we were taught not to do. But that saves $$$$$$. His office has an old xray unit that takes 8x10 xrays which is great if you have a really big foot.
The sterilizer that I saw is about 100 years old. Charting was some scribbled numbers that were some special codes he uses that he never explained, but he basically writes nothing and the notes aren't computerized. When talking to some of the other docs who work other offices, none of the other offices even HAVE computers or xrays!!!!???? Wow, that's cutting edge!!
It seemed like that all the doctors had to pick up supplies from the one main office and bring them wherever they were working. I was there one day when a doctor asked for ster-strips and heard him tell the other doctor that they were expensive, so he should just grab some from the hospital O.R. the next time he was there.
I was there a few Saturdays, and it was always the same patients coming back for some form of physical therapy, etc. I was speaking with some of the patients who said that they've been coming for years for the same problem.
After visiting modern up to date offices that have digital xrays, computers all over the place, electronic charting, lots of supplies, lots of patients getting better, etc., I realized what he was really about.
Does he make money? Yeah. But in my opinion its definitely at the expense of quality and its definitely not the way anyone I know wants to practice. He told me several times that someday "you want to be ME". I can guarantee you nothing can be further from the truth.
