When does an on-line review really matter?

A local surgeon recently received a very very poor review on Yelp.Com from a very legitimate source whom I had the opportunity to do a second opinion on.   Much of what was written including seeing 2 other surgeons who all agreed that the results were suboptimal.  Attempts from recruited patients to provide 5 star reviews failed to stay on and Yelp designated many of them as unreliable.  Now nepotism is used to try to camouflage the truth.  It seems an act of desperation when spouses, family, significant others, and employees (how can they truly be objective?) who happen to have a procedure done are now recruited en mass to help cover up an event that really happened.  It would have been much better had he resolved the problem from the beginning rather than try to smoother it with recruited ‘good’ reviews later that seem to have trouble with being legitimate.