Posted on 03/07/2006 11:33:16 AM PST by neverdem
Only if he's interested in buying one...
I am horrified at what your sister's doctor did to her! I hope she's switched drs since then. How awful - like you're not worried about your unborn child enough, but your doctor is pressuring you to abort your child?
"Do you wanna bet that if a doctor did not warn an older mother of all the risks he would lose his license if something went wrong."
This one crossed the line, from informing to advocacy, though. We were all surprised at what my sister told us; she's not assertive at all, as I mentioned, and she is also not very politically aware, she was just upset at the thought of possibly losing the baby she'd wanted for so long. We were also thoroughly surprised at the OB-GYN, because we know her family, who would be appalled.
Mom is right, as usual. :-)
It was a bunch of questions about the general environment and other things. They were all innocuous. I only remembered the gun question when a thread like this popped up earlier.
If they cross that line (and I give the mom the benefit of the doubt always) then they should knock it off. After our fourth kid they found some recessive genes in my wife and I and they scared they crap out of us. We had already decided that this was our last child but we wondered how we would have taken it if they told us after the first.
" I hope she's switched drs since then."
Nope. And, irony of ironies, my niece loves her, and calls her "Doctor Gail." Let's just hope the good doctor has it in her heart to feel remorse.
Good for your sister. There are millions more deaths from abortion than from guns. If you don't like what your doctor does or says, change doctors. No one is forcing you to see a doctor you cannot abide. As a matter of fact, my health is very good without seeing doctors.
If a doc or nurse is asking for the info, then it's part of the medical history in our therapeutic society which frowns upon any risk. To the busybodies and gungrabbers, it's not different in character from asking if someone smokes tobacco, drinks alcohol, uses illegal drugs, prior medical history, allergies or what medicines do they take.
Just ask Dr. Busybody how many malpractice suits have been filed against him and what their disposition was.
?? The Dem party is the lawyer party.
The trouble with any professional org is that the wrong people like to run them. Real people are too busy doing the thing that the org "represents." IOW, the Academies are dominated by those docs who don't like seeing patients. They're trying to find an exit from clinical work. So most docs are too busy (or uninterested) to even attend the meetings--and a few losers go after a political pulpit.
Lots and lots of docs pack. Some of them even used to carry in the ER. (Now with metal detectors, they don't.) So did some of the nurses, particularly the guy nurses. (!!!) It's a tough place, and the security guards are all cute 90-lb blondes.
Another thing, the academies decide what is "standard practice"--if a doc does something not standard, he's stuck with a poor defense in court. So sometimes they are manipulated into doing things and asking questions they'd rather not ask.
It could be adapted to any number of situations as well.
L
"I answer what I want to answer."
As is your right. I question whether you made a wise decision, however.
You refer to "smacking down" your doctor's questions, should he take issue with your answers. But how do you know that this questionnaire originates from your doctor? Physicians across the country all began asking these questions in the past year or so. I do not think this is a coincidence. Nor do I think they all got convinced this was a way to improve service for their patients at the annual AMA convention.
It is far more likely that they are collecting this information for someone else. How do you know this information won't wind up in the Medical Information Burea database, or some other global database of private individuals' personal information? Well, you don't.
A couple of years ago, after I got new medical insurance, I received a questionnaire from some outfit called the "Rawlings Group" in Kentucky, asking me all sorts of questions about health insurance, for example, any health insurance I had other than with the company I had just signed up with. The cover letter said it would "improve" the service I received.
I checked the Rawlings group out on the internet. Unlike their warm and fuzzy cover letter to patients, their website was not directed to patients' concerns. There was nothing on their website about improving service to patients. There was also nothing about sporting equipment, in case you were wondering. There was a lot about improving the profits of health insurance companies though. The website stated "We are data-miners". In other words,they were assembling data on individual patients for the insurance company, and probably to sell to other insurance companies.
I checked my insurance policy to see if I was under any contractual duty to respond to questionnaires, and I could not see that I was. So, they could not cancel my policy if I ignored the the questionnaire, which I did.
Later I got a "second notice" from Rawlings stating that I had failed to respond to the initial questionnaire. The second notice did NOT state that I was under any duty to respond, or that anything bad would happen if I did not respond. So I ignored it as well. Later I received a "final notice" -again, no threat of consequences if I ignored it. So, I figured that this "final notice" was a promise that if I ignored it as well, they would go away and not come back. Which is what happened.
This story illustrates a few points - 1) when you give away personal information, you do not necessarily know who will get it or how it will be used, 2) the people collecting the information will lie to you about their motives, and 3) when you refuse to comply, you are not likely to be pressured.
Your privacy rights, and my privacy rights, are under attack from all sides. For more information, check out http://www.privacyrights.org/
I am speaking as one who has had multiple background checks by governmental and quasi-governmental agencies, including one that uncovered a dismissed driving offense when I was a juvenile that was "sealed" - I could not even get it myself if I wanted to. I have been fingerprinted probably half a dozen times and was once subjected to a lie detector test.
My advice is no matter how honest you are, or how righteous you are, or how blameless you are, there is no substitute for refusing to answer when people are asking you for personal information that is none of their business. There is no "second best" option.
"You wouldn't put up with your auto mechanic asking if you have guns in the house?"
My mechanic and I talk guns all the time. Now if he starts asking me about my dental health, I'll tell him to take a hike!
Has anyone addressed the fact that alot of "medical transcribing" is being done in other countries?
Who knows where the logs of who has guns who does not is ending up?
Medical privacy laws. I have signed nothing that allows him free reign to give out my family's information. OTOH, you have raised some questions, so I'll ask on my next visit.
I am speaking as one who has had multiple background checks by governmental and quasi-governmental agencies
Me too. Don't you just hate ESPQ?
The anti-gunners are always looking to infiltrate friendly groups, and then use them to promote the anti-gun agenda. They were doing similar things with PTAs a couple of years back. Remember the old business about how nobody was supposed to let their children play with other children who had guns in the house? I literally heard that BS about twenty times when my child was in pre-school. After everybody either learned to lie or tell them to buzz off, that fell by the boards.
The sad thing is, after people get used to telling their pediatricians to buzz off over this, the anti-gunners will move onto the next group to exploit. The are like political locusts. They leave nothing but destruction in their wake.
Luckily that wouldn't fly around here. In looking through the grade school's and PTA's literature I haven't seen one reference to guns, except that they are by law not allowed on campus.
I have less faith in the medical privacy laws than you do. Particularly the "privacy" provisions in HIPAA.
One of the innovations HIPAA brought in is a single MANDATED system of coding all medical procedures, diagnoses, prescriptions, injections, what have you, nationwide, for all health professionals to use. I originally thought that these were proprietary codes used only by my insurance company. In fact, they are government mandated.
From a Virginia governmenal website - not sure what it was but it had Virginia.gov in it:
[begin]
CMS to Enforce HIPAA TCS Standards
October 15, 2002- HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson announced that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid will be reinforcing the HIPAA transaction and code sets standards. .
You can now use the Online Complaint Submission Form to submit complaints about covered entities who are not compliant with the HIPAA electronic transactions and code set standards.
[end]
"Don't you just hate ESPQ?"
I had to look that up. Yes, I did hate it, when I was in that business. It would be far worse now, as I am a lot further from my 18th birthday. The worst part was telling my "hippie-type individual" roommates that they had to fill out information too, and a call I got from my [legal] alien girlfriend's lefty academic sister and brother-in-law wondering why men in suits were asking them questions about me.
As ridesthemiles notes above, many medical transcribing groups are out of country, and are governed by those other countries' laws. There have been cases where the transciber has a dispute with their U.S. employer and uses public release of the private medical records as a threat in order to resolve it.
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