Virginia Cafaro's Online Review Report Card

Im impressed by the number of positive reviews.  Based on them, I suspect that Dr Carfaros professional interests and commitments focus on treating illnessesand serious ones, at thatrather than people who go to see her for an annual physical, as I did.  I recently signed up for Dr Mark Higgins at Wellspring. This was going to be my first annual physical (and wellness) exam.  I was told he couldnt see me due to a family emergency, that Id be seeing Dr Cafaro, instead. Dr Cafaro asked me to take a seat, and then sat in front of her computer monitor. Presumably reading from her monitor, she then asked me a bunch of questions (about meds, other doctors I see, and family history), prefacing one or two of them with Medicare wants to know ....  After about 20 minutes of that, she put her stethoscope to her ears, and listened to my breathing. She also took my blood pressure because I asked her to. (It was unusually high when the assistant checked me in.)Call me oldfashioned, but in all my 70+ years of getting annual physicals (my previous doctor just retired), never have I had a more cursory oneone where, apart from that stethoscope touching my chest and back, there was no touching (at all!), and almost no expression of interest, much less desire to get to know me.  It seemed to me that the receptionist could have done pretty much the same thingi.e., read from what was displayed on a computer monitor, tick some boxes, and enter a few words here and there.When I went to Lab Corps, I learned that the urinalysis had been miscodedthat is, I learned about this upon going back to LabCorb a second time to find out why I hadnt been asked to pee in a cup.  All in all, I think my insurance company and I deserved more in return for whatever Dr Cafaro charged.

Dr Cafaro has been harmful in her treatment to trans patients. There is no room for judgemental and transphobic physicians in the medical field. I do not recommend this physician, especially for trans and nonbinary patients. Some of her actions include invalidating a patients identity, misgendering, and providing personal judgements and advice instead of useful information and medical assistance for what a patient was seeking help for.

Dr. Cafaro is not only compassionate, kind and extremely competent but also up to date on various facts and procedures.  She has a quick and funny sense of humorand is also willing to listen to the patients point of view.I feel so fortunate to have her as my primary care physician.  What a down to earth person!

What a great find and a wonderful, caring doctor with a great sense of humor.  Easy parking and so far I have not had to sit for any length of time in there waiting area.

Ive downgraded my rating because it is so hard to get anyone on the phone in this office.

Confused me with other patients, overly concerned with medicines prescribed years prior and the status of her files in review, dropped insurer based on erroneous information.

Great doctor, wouldnt want anyone else but her office staff sucks when it comes to the phones.  Sometimes it is very difficult to reach anyone, even her PA.  Wish that problem would be corrected but I see no signs of it happening anytime soon.

Dr. Virginia Cafaro is incredibly transphobic and unprofessional, I went in to talk about starting testosterone and I received a 30 minute lecture about how I was a confused lesbian and that sometimes when neither boys or girls like us we look for other answers, and that testosterone would destroy my body and that i would regret top surgery and phalloplasty. She did not even let me interject or ask me what I wanted, I never even brought up phalloplasty because that is not something I want, however it was about 10 minutes worth of a 30 minutes lecture. This lecture was a response to me saying that I wanted to start testosterone, and she assumed the rest. I found this incredibly offensive, the fact that she decided my identity and tried to steer me away from it is incredibly harmful. Her lecture was incredibly hateful and offensive. She even proceeded to tell me about other patients which I felt was incredibly inappropriate and violates their privacy. She also dismissed the fact that I could bipolar 2 by saying you are just depressed and your therapist is wrong. To top it all off she assured me that I would get Anal cancer if I did not get the shot she recommended for me, and described the many ways I could die of Anal cancer and if I were pregnant how it would effect the baby. I do not think this individual should be practicing medicine, I will not be returning to this practice and I recommend that you do not either.

BEST experience at the Dr. ever! I have been dreading going in to a new doctor for a while and I am so glad I found Virgina. She is very easy to talk to and made the whole experience feel very comfortable.

Like a previous reviewer who gave Dr. Cafaro 5 stars, I have been her patient for over 20 years. Unlike him I am not surprised that people give mixed reviews, but I believe the reviews are mixed primarily because her front desk staff unfortunately does not represent the quality or character of the practice as a whole that is, the service is spotty and, to be honest, one member of the front staff is downright surly. When I first began seeing Dr. Cafaro in 1992 her office staff was efficient, empathetic, entertaining, and most loveable the best office staff I had ever had the pleasure of going through when I needed to see my doctor. I have no idea what  happened as people moved on in their careers and others were hired. She took me as her patient in the wake of a catastrophic year in which they had lost 14 men to AIDS. Newly arrived in San Francisco, I had been phoning through a lengthy list to find a doctor. I was turned down time after time, and I was fortunate to be added to Dr. Cafaros patient roll. Over the years Dr. Cafaro has become one of the nations most respected doctors in the field of retroviruses, dealing daily with HIV, HepC, and other medical nightmares that have, as a result of her work and that of so many others, gradually been brought under some semblance of control. Dr. Cafaro is the most brilliant personal physician I have known. She is able to take random symptoms and make sense of them. She is a healer. And she takes her time. One person describes her as garrulous, not negatively; I would not, however, agree. She has a wonderful sense of humor, but over the course of an appointment, she gathers odd bits of information, sometimes seemingly unrelated, and by appointment end, she generally secures a solution to even enigmatic difficulties. Also, unlike many physicians trained in western medicine, she recommends medical practices that fall under the umbrella of medical care, but are often viewed skeptically by western doctors. She does not deny the power of eastern medicine, for example, and if she is perplexed by a condition will recommend naturopathy and other umbrella practices.Her primary PA, Jennifer Chen, is well trained, efficient, and brusque. She provides a counterpoint to Dr. Cafaros more leisurely approach to medicine, but, unlike a previous PA who remained only a short time, she is excellent at what she does. She is blunt, can be skeptical, but unlike one brutal harangue against her in these reviews, she is not angry, bitter, or hateful. She simply does not strive to be your mother. I call attention to this because as a professor I have read studies of student evaluations, and I believe that students expectations of women professors are much like patients expectations of female doctors: they want nurturers, women who exude empathy and affection, who for all intents and purposes behave like their ideal mother (and perhaps not like their real mother at all). They do not expect this from men, and, indeed, for the very same traits that they lower their ratings of women professors, they honor male professors. Much of the same, I believe, goes on in peoples minds when they go to a woman doctor or PA. The brusqueness that they would describe as intelligence and incisiveness in a male doctor or PA, they experience as bitchiness from a woman doctor or PA. Thats the way of our world. Female professionals have to live with it and discover ways of dealing with it. Jen is outstanding; she could easily be a doctor if she chose to be. We are the ones who need to examine our preconceptions of how women professionals need to behave.