Much the same way you can review books or rate your kitchen appliances, Canadian patients are busy kibitzing about their doctors online. Although some doctors welcome the feedback, plenty of others can’t stomach the idea of anonymous, unproven accusations made public. What are your options to deal with online reviews?

Say please. Mom was right: it never hurts to be polite. It might not pan out but it’s worth sending a complaint to the website if you feel a comment should be removed. However, the people who start anonymous ratings sites usually do so for a reason, and it’s not to censor their users.

Cajole and threaten. Is it deterrence or intimidation? U.S.-based company Medical Justice has patients sign a “Mutual Agreement” in which the patient pledges only to publish on approved websites that verify commenters were in fact treated by the doctor. The controversial contract grants copyright to patients’ postings to their doctor, and it includes an “actionable tool” to fight libel. It’s hard to say whether this idea will prove effective, but one sign of its potential is that the founder of RateMDs felt sufficiently threatened to create a “gag contract wall of shame.” Medical Justice expanded its operations to Canada this year but hasn’t begun marketing yet and has only a handful of members here.

Sue. Last year, Dr. Mohamed Foda, a Leduc, Alberta, urologist, did something that no doctor had dared to do before: he filed a lawsuit in an American court and had the court issue a subpoena to RateMDs to force the company to divulge who posted the allegedly libelous comments. The company was forced to give up the information, and one negative rating turned out to have come not from a patient but from a defendant in another lawsuit Dr. Foda filed in Alberta. Dr. Foda has proved RateMDs is not invincible, but if you’re not ready to spend thousands of dollars and innumerable hours filing lawsuits then you’ll have to consider another idea.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Sure, one or two awful comments might make you look bad if you’ve only got a few in total. But contrary to popular belief among anxious doctors, the majority of ratings on RateMDs and most similar sites are positive, so encouraging more of your patients to rate you should bring your average up.

Take it to heart. This may not satisfy your urge to exact revenge, but it might just be the best solution of all: think of the comments as continuing professional development. We’ve noticed that several potentially remediable complaints tend to drag Canadian doctors’ ratings down: wait times, feeling rushed and poor bedside manner are frequent problems, but perhaps the most common complaint is the attitude of office staff. Maybe those anonymous ratings are trying to tell you something, if you’d take a moment to listen.