OHSU Endocrinology Clinic

I have been a patient at OHSU Endocrinology for a couple years. The MD I first saw was a Dr. Prunell. The intake visit lasted about 15 minutes. I described my symptoms and test results. He demonstrated skepticism of my diagnoses of «adrenal fatigue.» However, one of the two good things he did was he was willing to schedule tests and provide referrals for me.
One test produced a positive result corroborating my first test. Our next meetings were consistently brief, and he mentions in his medical report when our meeting took as long as a half an hour. Purnell denied my inital test results’ significance and suggested I take another. He also began suggesting that I see a psychiatrist for my fatigue symptoms. This tells me he was suggesting I ignore the facts of my lab results, neglect the hormonal deficiency and doubt my mental health, instead.
On a side note, nearly every time that I would email, call and fax Purnell with information (which he failed to read or scoffed at) and questions/​requests I failed to get a reasonably timely response. The phone rarely gets anwered. When you are in the office, no phones are ringing at all. When I call I go through the extended outgoing message only to be re-​routed to is even after the phone begins to ring. They may be swamped so this deparment might want to hire someone to pick up the slack, even outsource it in India if that is the best they can do. When you do call before 8 AM and can leave a message, they are never returned. I never have recieved one back in the two years I have contacted the front desk.
Additionally, when in person, I pointed out the possible validity of my health issue referring to a Harvard trained physician, Purnell dismissed this MD and hinted his doubting of the Harvard MDs validity in the medical record he wrote up.
Regarding OSHU Endocrinology Reception, my faxes, that I had spent a lot of time to make clear and easy to file, would nearly always get lost by the front desk receptionists. Their standard refrain was «this is a high volume fax machine» which means we never look and never care.
If it is so unmanageable for reception to tend to the faxes, OSHU may need to hire a reliable person to sort faxes so diabetic patients with immediate life threatening documentation can be assured it will be properly filed.
The last time I faxed something I called before and after and waited on hold even when the receptionist was trying to put me off telling me she would «call me when she found it.» It took me multiple calls and waiting on hold for 15 minutes to get a hold of a live person and you will call me back when you find my fax? Yeah, right.
In one of our initial appointments he told me that he got patients with my symptoms «all the time.» He said that he told them their hormones were normal, too. So these folks spent three or four hundred dollars on someone who has a blind eye to the facts about our hormone deficiency.
On the good side, the second good thing Purnell did was provide a second opinion. This took several months for him to do. While the second MD was willing to consider the test results objectively, I felt he would have taken Purnells’ path of denial had I failed to have details from an MD from a different department who wrote of my positive test results in his record. It is as if OHSU Endocrinology wants to resist acknowledging the facts of my labs which has lead me to languish in debilitating fatigue for years. This second endo did a gold standard test which proved again that my condition exists.
To me to deliberately lead your patient away from solutions and to an erroneous path is the last thing an MD should do. I would recommend going elsewhere. If you have to go here, be on your toes about everything or get someone else to do so.