NYU Student Health Center

Visited here 4 times in the past 3 years. Three of those times, I ended being directed to better clinics for treatment. For the fourth, I had to return, in pain, everyday for a week until the doctor was absolutely convinced I needed a prescription antibiotics and steroids. Staff isn’t very well equipped to deal with ailments in-​house, unless it’s a cold (they’ll recommend nyquil) or fatigue (free gatorade and an orange). Not a final destination for proper healthcare.

A complete and utter joke. I have never received any sound treatment there for anything.

The wait is real.
Scraped and bloody all over and they still need you to sign up and pay $ 10 in addition to your thousands of dollars in insurance. What is this?
Anyway, after the service I am very pleased with the Doctor. He was very informative and gave me proper instructions on how to deal with my wound after patching me up. He also double checked if I needed a vaccine that could infect my wound that had been optional for people. So instead of 1 star, here’s 3.

Q: What do you call someone who graduated last in their med school class?
A: An MD.
Or, in real life, a PCP at NYU Student Health Center.
You would think that since NYU’s REAL health services (among them Langone, their medical school, etc.) are so renowned that their student center would at least somewhat try to embody the excellence of those institutions (or at least not be totally terrible).
However based on SEVERAL interactions I’ve had with the medical staff here I have to say that this entire place is a walking malpractice suit. The «doctors» here are equipped to a) order basic blood tests for your annual and b) (Not relevant to my situation, but guessing based on the student population) do things like prescribe you birth control and maybe tell you not to drink too much. Which to be fair is probably about 90% of the undergrads that come their way, but being that NYU’s students range from undergrad to 40 year old graduate students, this is not an excuse.
Asides from that, Google is seriously a better doctor.
To impart the seriousness of the their negligence — I wound up in the ER (Langone no less) as a result of an acute condition with an underlying disorder. Literally, the ER tested me for a cancer condition because that’s the first thing my symptoms brought to mind — that’s how serious they were. Prior to this I had gone to the student health center 5 times; ALL of which resulted in them telling me that I just probably had a cold. They fail on BASIC practice procedures and diagnosis– they don’t even know how to touch me to see if I had swollen lymph nodes, or other things like that.
This place is terrifying on all levels and if I didn’t know how to advocate for myself I would be in a serious mess.
The 1 star is for being able to make appointments online, but the whole system otherwise is terrible because you can’t talk to your doctors directly — everything goes through a central system with the receptionist and you don’t get their phone numbers. Also, their specialists –dermatologists, GIs, radiologists (referred outside of the health centers) are REAL doctors, so not terrible.

Even if you have an appointment, be prepared for the fact that you may need to wait at least 45 mins if the doctor has something more important to do.
I recently went there and the doctor apologizes saying, «I’m sorry but, they’re here to fix my printer right now so I hope you don’t mind waiting a little while»… A little while meaning 45 mins after my appointment time?! NOT OKAY at all!
When the doctor did eventually see me, she didn’t explain that she was hard of hearing and then raised her voice at me saying that I needed to speak up.
Needless to say, I was very disappointed in the service I received.

Terrible, useless health center. Come here if:
1) you need a sick note, in which case you better make an appointment in advance on line, or be prepared to pay $ 10 and wait for hours
2) you need tylenol, because that’s all they’re going to give you
absolutely atrocious

A hit or a miss, depending what day you visit.
The nurses are kind and genuinely nice, but the wait time can be insane. I’ve waited over an hour on several occasions, some for walk-​ins (which can be expected) but some for appointments made days in advance, which is ridiculous.
The SHC’s counseling center is helpful and the staff is friendly, and most importantly, the counselors are patient and understanding (which I guess is a part of their job).

Because of a truly horrendous experience in NYU Optometry’s office last year, I decided that I would rather give my business elsewhere. For the past year I have been ordering contacts through 1– 800– Contacts instead of NYU. This arrangement worked fine until I decided to order a few more boxes the week that my prescription was to expire, which was when I would finally be free from any ties to NYU’s Optometry Department.
To make a long story short, 1−800-Contacts originally canceled my contact lens order because NYU Optometry had told them that my prescription had expired. This is not true. If you look at the fax records, you will see that I had ordered three boxes of contacts through 1−800-Contacts on April 28, 2011, one day before my prescription was to expire. To tell a third party that my prescription was expired, when it was in fact not, is disgusting business practice. Thankfully for me, 1−800-Contacts processed the order anyway once they had someone review the prescription form I had sent them when I first started purchasing contacts from them.
To reiterate my letter from last year: From now on, I will be paying out of pocket to another optometrist in the city. As a graduate student with a miniscule stipend, I’m sure you can only imagine exactly how much I detest the way I am and was treated by NYU Optometry’s staff.