Opinions decide, and answering them has a catch.

Choosing a clinic is not much like choosing a restaurant

Somebody looking for a dentist, a physiotherapist or a psychologist is not comparing prices: they are looking for somebody to trust with something that matters to them. So they read the reviews in full, the bad ones included, and above all they read how the clinic replies. A calm reply convinces more than the average score.

The expensive mistake: replying as if nobody else were reading

Faced with unfair criticism, the temptation is to explain the case: «you came three times, you were told that…». At that point you have published on the internet that this person is a patient and what was done to them, which is exactly what article 9 of the GDPR protects in reinforced form, and it also collides with the duty of confidentiality over medical records set out in Spain’s Law 41/2002.

The right reply confirms and denies nothing: it thanks, regrets the experience, explains how the clinic works in general and offers to talk it over privately. It reads as professional, and it does not open a front the review did not have on its own.

Asking without crossing the line

Asking a happy patient for a review is fine and legitimate. What you cannot do is give something in exchange: Google’s policies forbid incentivised reviews. And there is one more precaution here: the request must not arrive through a channel that reveals the treatment, nor mention why that person came.

Showing them on the site, sensibly

Good reviews can be shown on the website, and they help a great deal on each specialty page. They get published exactly as their author wrote them, with a link to the profile so they can be checked; what does not happen is rewriting them or signing them with more detail than the writer gave.

The same thing, explained in general: Google profile