David L. Macintosh Sport Medicine Clinic

As a UofT student, I was thrilled to find out that I could receive free treatment (minus a $ 60 administrative charge) for back pain that had been haunting me for several years but that I had been too poor to seriously address. The way it works is that you call and make an appointment with a doctor who will them determine the next course of action, whether it’s massage, athletic therapy, physical therapy etc., all of which is provided on-​site.
To make a very long story short, I ended up seeing three different doctors over the span of about eight months, who gave me different diagnoses and never actually bothered to touch my body to feel WTF was going wrong. I know touch isn’t always necessary to determine the source of problems, but in this case I could literally feel my joints moving around in my back and in my knee, but nobody listened. The end result of that approach only ended up making my problems worse.
Under the alternating supervision of those doctors, I was assigned to an athletic therapist, then without warning switched to a different athletic therapist, and then finally switched to a physiotherapist. The athletic therapists (and to a lesser extent the PT) were friendly and competent, but ultimately useless as they were following the doctors’ instructions which were based on a fundamentally wrong understanding of the problem. In fact, as I later found out when I finally gave in and went to a private clinic, all the adjustments, massages and rehab exercises they had me doing for those eight months were the exact *opposite* of what I should have been doing: the doctors at the clinic assumed I had some kind of arthritis (even though the blood tests came back negative), and all the stretching and muscle lengthening exercises only exacerbated the actual problem of having two hypermobile joints in my lower back that needed to be strengthened, not relaxed. I believe that if anyone had actually listened to my concerns and bothered to rest their hand on my lower back for just a few seconds I wouldn’t have spent eight months essentially sabotaging my recovery. And, I suspect that had I been a varsity athlete I, and my symptoms, would have been taken a lot more seriously and received a different level of care.
I also found the administrative setup there to be needlessly inefficient. For example, during the course of my treatment there I developed tendonitis in my wrists and arms, which to me was pretty clearly caused by some of the rehab exercises they had me do. But, because that’s a different part of the body and not what my original complaint was, I had to see yet another doctor to get that taken care of, a doctor who didn’t really have any clue about the kind of treatment I was already receiving. Even what goes on at the front desk can be hit or miss; the receptionists are generally pleasant but one time someone scheduled me for an appointment without my knowledge (??), and they rather aggressively tried to charge me for missing it. I’m incredibly neurotic about dates and times and am certain this was an error on their part, but despite my punctuality during every other appointment (2 – 3 times a week) they refused to give me the benefit of the doubt.
I know other people have had good experiences at the McIntosh clinic and I’m sure it’s a great place for dealing with minor sports injuries if you’re not a varsity athlete. For more complex problems, though, and if you want to develop a good doctor/​therapist-​patient relationship in the interest of truly understanding the root of the issue, it might be best to look elsewhere.