Dr. Anita Joyce Bell, MD

I have been a patient of Dr. Bell for approx. 8 yrs and have positively NO COMPLAINTS! She has always treated me with respect and listened to my concerns, promptly scheduled me for any tests that may be needed and followed up with the results in a timely manner. She also schedules any referral appointments with specialists that may be needed. Bedside manner is unbelievably great, with a genuine sense of concern and familiarity.

Dr Bell is willing to listen to concerns and suggest alternatives and/or solutions when patients have a concern about conventional medicine. She treats her patients as individuals and not as one-size-fits-all.

When I expressed my concern about my elderly mother's change in behavour, she had textbook symptoms of dementiaacting irrationally, crying jags, anxiety, angry outbursts, paranoid, accusatory, memory loss. Dr. Bell wasn't so sure...it only took her three years to realize yep, thats what shes got, leaving my mother needlessly miserable and upset when a few simple anti anxiety drugs and anti depressants would have worked miracles and made her comfortable. In hindsight she needed a geriatric specialist; Dr. Bell is an internist, who may have some skills, but treating the elderly is not one of them.Perhaps most unforgivable is that she had no sensitivity to family dynamics and destroyed the already shakey bridge between us. Promising to keep my concerns for my mother confidential--to avoid stirring up more anxiety in a patient she failed to diagnose--she immediately relayed that I wanted her to run some tests to see if she was mentally competent. That made my mother even more paranoid, while Dr. Bell acted as if nothing was wrong.A prompt and accurate diagnosis would have spared my mother --and the family--mental anguish, pain and pain and suffering and given us the harmony and health care we deserved. Asking around, I learn we are not the only ones whose elderly parent was badly managed. Maybe her brand of bad medicine gets by in South Georgia, but I'd urge anyone with an elderly parent to take their Mama and run...to a geriatric specialist. Anyone but Dr. Bell.