Posted on 05/21/2005 7:15:04 AM PDT by nuconvert
well I had the luxury, I guess, of having to do some physical therapy on my elbow before I had it operated on. While in the physical therapy, they had some pictures of athletes and other people my surgeon had operated on. One of them specifically was Ki-Jana Carter.
when I asked about him, they told me about this and that and other accomplishments...
My elbow surgery was done by one of the best.
Sure, just ask your GP "which surgeon would you use if it was your wife or kid going under the knife?"
They'll give you an honest answer.
The other doc you can ask that question of is the local pathologist who is generally familiar with the outcomes of most surgeons.
The OR nursing staff also know as do the anesthesiology personnel.
There is a distinct possibility that political correctness played a role in this mans medical career. People are so brainwashed that none of his supervising doctors could bring themselves to say this guy is a "hack!"(pun intended)
>>• A man, 59, who permanently lost gastrointestinal function in August 1997 after Dr Patel performed a colostomy "backwards". <<
That had to be exciting! Did the patient try to kill him afterwards?
If a doctor's name
is on the chart, then he did
something in the case.
But, in general,
in any other context
this activity
would be accepted
(or even celebrated!)
as how the "market"
and legal system
compels a loose profession
to clean up its act.
But the doctors don't
turn on each other, they blame
laws and the "system."
There is only two professions where licensed and titled individuals 'practice' their trade. Lawyers and doctors!
Everyone else just performs their duties without practicing on the client.
There is of course QuackWatch, but that really doesn't tell you about individual doctors.
I did a Google search, and here might be some interesting candidates, but I cannot vouch for any of them.
Interestingly enough, the public is forbidden access to our own government databank of information (National Practitioner Data Bank in the Department of Human and Health Services) about problems with doctors:
Is prohibited by law to disclose information on a specific practitioner to the general public.
That reminds me of the joke:
What do you call someone who graduated last in his med school?
"Doctor"
If the medical profession "were protecting its own", his failures would never have seen the light of day.
It was his Portland, Oregon hospital, not the State of Oregon, that first stripped him of his right to perform surgery and that action ultimately led to his leaving the United States altogether.
Only Government agencies have the right to issue or revoke a medical license. If the world's worst doctor is practicing bad medicine in town, other doctors can ban him from their own practices or their hospitals and complain to the State but only the State has a right to strip him of his license to practice medicine in a solo practice.
This guy fled all the way to the outback of Australia in order to get away from the scrutiny of his medical colleagues.
It was the responsibility of the Australian Government to adequately investigate his competency before issuing him a license to practice medicine in Australia and the Australian Government failed to do so.
I usually get a laugh out of reading these threads. Does the medical profession protect its own?
A hospital decides to have an MD kicked of its staff for failing to practice medicine in the usual and customary manner. The physician leadership agrees, and the MD in question is told he is on probation. He continues to do the same things he's been warned not to do, and the hospital and physician leadership continue to document the instances, at extra cost to the hospital and time to the physician reviewers (review charts, speak with patients, collect outcome data, etc). All of this is done "for free". Thankfully, no harm is done to any patients. Mainly the MD in question was overbilling for procedures that he hadn't done.
The hospital, after time and effort, fires him from its staff. They report him to the state Medical Board along with all of the findings of their investigation. What do you think happened next? The fired MD sues the state Medical Board, hospital, and individual MD's that recommended his removal from the staff for "ruining" his reputation . He wins a multi million $ judgement from the hospital, his transgressions are minimized by the state Medical Board by court order, and each individual MD that was sued, spent $, time, and many sleepless nights while defending themselves in court proceedings. Luckily, the individual suits were eventually dropped.
I was intimately involved in the above case. Do physicians protect their own? You be the judge. I'll tell you that personally, I'll think long and hard before going through a situation like that again.
I honestly believe that each and every Super 8 Motel I've ever bunked at has been run by a guy named Patel.
Who do you think makes up the State Boards? Who do you think makes up the state laws? You think MD's might be involved somewhere in there?
In Texas if you are a pharmacist and go bad, the Board of Pharmacy will come down on hard, really hard.
This man has had his license yanked in New York and Oregon, and will soon be banned from practice in Australia, if he hasn't already.
It's an urban myth that incompetent doctors are allowed to practice indefinitely with no oversight. My own state of Arizona suspends or revokes dozens of medical licenses every year. And it's a myth that the various state medical boards do not communicate with each other; that may have been true once, but nowadays a suspension in one state is cause for suspension in any other state.
But the various notifications and investigations take time, if there is going to be anything like due process before someone's livelihood and twenty years of education is flushed down the toilet. And of course the investigatory process is clogged by complaints from unhappy patients who don't like their doctors' bedside manner or think his bill is too high. By law, each of those has to be investigated with the same diligence as they do for the doctor who does colostomies backwards.
The system is not perfect, but it's better than in any other country, and almost all the time it functions correctly. Horror stories like this are the rare exception, and that's why they are in the newspaper.
-ccm
"God, preserve me from bad doctors, and bad priests.
Why are they allowed to continue to practice?
Could it be that nobody is filing any Q.A. reports?
If you are seeing malpractice, then it is your ethical and legal obligation as an RN to file a report about that malpractice.
Other doctors have their own patients and practices and may have no more idea about what another doctor is doing than an RN on the Pediatric Ward knows about what an RN in the General Surgery Ward is doing.
If you see Dr. Smith committing malpractice in Room 302, you can't expect Doctor Jones in Room 507 to telepathically know about it and do something about it.
If YOU see malpractice, it is YOUR ethical and legal obligation to file a report about it with your Hospital Q.A. Committee. If the matter is not dealt with appropriately at that level, then it is YOUR ethical and legal obligation to file a report with your State Medical Licensing Q.A. Board.
If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
"Public members"............That would also include you, would it not?
If you truly believe that State Medical Licensing Boards are nothing more than corrupt Medical Mafias, well, then, volunteer yourself to be a member of your State Board and do something about it.
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