Let’s start with the good: Dr. Ballinger knows her stuff and took good care of our kid's mouth. His airway was restricted and through a palate expander, he was able to get significant jaw growth which we are happy about. Her team is friendly and excellent with kids. The office is kid-friendly, though it is open-concept so you don’t have a lot of privacy.
The bad is quite long, but the TL;DR; is that she does not like being challenged at all and acted very professionally towards us. It was quite alarming that a medical professional treated us this way. For anyone considering her, please read on.
At the outset of our son’s treatmeent, we had a couple of hours-long consultation. In that session, Dr. Ballinger spent a few hours with us, and we were amazed by her and her practice. Because we would be driving approximately three hours each way to visit her, she said that some of our care could be done via telehealth. We were very hesitant to sign up for her services since she was so far away, but the video calls were enough to convince us.
However, as we went on with treatment, we slowly realized that Dr. Ballinger does not like being challenged with her ideas, and often bristles at detailed questions or asks for things outside her usual treatment plan. With her, we had the most unprofessional interaction we have ever had with a service provider of any type. At one point when asking questions about treatment, she called my wife and I and lectured us about “bothering” her team by asking questions about doing video visits. She accused us of treating her like a “service plumber” (what’s wrong with a plumber?). She barely let us get a word in; most of the half-hour call was her lecturing us about us mistreating her team. The mistreatment? Texting them twice, asking to speak with Dr. ballinger and trying to call numerous times (and failing) to talk to a person.
They were dismissive when we questioned them about coming in immediately when a wire broke on our son’s appliance. His appliance started to fall out, one-half of it was still attached, and he couldn’t eat. This happened on a Friday. We contacted them in the afternoon, and we didn’t receive a call back until 4pm on Saturday, 24 hours later. We had to go to our local dentist on an emergency visit to repair it and put it back in. We drove 3 hours the following monday to be told he didn’t need it in anymore. We were, understandably, very frustrated. They had absolutely no compassion for our son or us.
When he received his headgear, the initial version didn’t work and we pushed Dr. Ballinger to work with our local dentist to figure out how to take measurements so we didn’t have to drive back and forth so much. We received an extremely condescending email back.
We felt very in the dark throughout the course of treatment being told many times “we just have to see how this unfolds.”
She did not examine our son at each visit, just occasionally. We would expect paying the amount that we did, or really of any Dentist/orthodontist that we would at least be able to speak to the Doctor each visit, even if just briefly.
On our second visit, when his appliance was being put in, the technician told our five year old son “oh don’t worry, this will be out in a couple of weeks.” The reality was that he would have this appliance in for over a year. When we asked why she said that, we didn’t get an answer.
Be warned.
