The Hand and Upper Extremity Center of GA

My experience with Dr Costas, Mary, and the rest of the staff here was one of the best experiences I’ve had with a doctor’s office ever. I had some weird infection in a finger and Dr Costas fit me in that afternoon after I was sent there from another doctor. They spend 1+ hour with me to do a minor surgery that day, staying late to tend to me. I was the last one out of the office at 6pm.
I was tended to by 5 or so different nurses and they were all excellent and very caring. Dr Costas did an amazing job on the procedure and you can hardly tell now because he did a good job of placing the incision.
Overall, I loved these guys and am so grateful they worked me into their schedule when they were already over-​booked. Thanks guys!

I came here in support of my Boss, a retired M.D., and he was very satisfied on every level with his overall visit/​appt. etc.

My 84 yr. old mother made an appt. with Dr. Gary Lourie. When she arrived for her appt, the office staff told her Dr. Lourie wouldn’t see her because 2 yrs. ago, she saw another dr in that office. My mother was stunned and asked the office staff why they didn’t tell her this on the phone when she made the appt. They had no answer for her. They then suggested she drive to another office so the other dr. could see her and fit her in.
I am stunned they would treat anyone like this let alone an elderly person. I never heard of a doctor’s office not seeing you because you saw another dr. in that office in the past. I felt their treatment of her was terrible. I would not recommend this hand center.

Whenever someone asks me if the medicine I took for a minor ailment worked, I’m never quite sure how to weigh the results. After all, the body does have some healing powers of its own and I tend to think that by the time I give in and take medicine, my body has nearly recovered. I feel similarly about an operation — how does one judge if they’ve had a good surgery if nothing drastic went wrong?
I broke my hand playing tennis in November 2010 and after doing some research, I decided to have the Hand and Upper Extremity Center of GA (it was also the group that the ER recommended) take on my operation. All of the doctors at this practice have the highest of credentials (they have more than one Harvard fellow and the rest of the team reads like a Who’s Who of hand surgery). I selected Dr. Lourie from another very capable doctor’s recommendation.
On my first visit, Lourie said that I would be playing tennis again in 6 weeks. I had the first surgery two days later and I definitely felt like I was in capable hands. Everything went off without a hitch and was virtually painless. Then I waited… and waited. About a month later the second, planned surgery came. Nearly three weeks after that, the stitches came out. And in another week, physical therapy began. You see where I’m going with this right? Lourie was way off on his prediction of me playing tennis again in six weeks.
Even after a few weeks of physical therapy, my hand (especially my wrist from atrophy) was weak. I’d say the full recovery, where I wasn’t limited in any way, was about four months.
So was it a good surgery? Hard for me to tell, but I imagine so. My joint near the surgery is still a little sore and my wrist is still tender, but there’s nothing I really can’t do that I could do before. The speed and helpfulness of the team that took care of me was really top tier and I appreciate how easy it was to ask a question and get an answer or appointment.
I only have two qualms about the entire experience outside of the recovery time prediction:
1. When removing the stitches, they left one of the threads in my hand which I removed myself from home.
2. During the operation prep, there is one main job of the preliminary nurse — that is to get the IV set. If a nurse can’t do this in two tries, she can’t do her job and that really got to me since a. I don’t take kindly to needles and b. I was already nervous about the surgery. The first surgery prep was handled swiftly including the nerve-​blocks, but the second time, the simple IV was botched multiple times.