OK...al you have to do to prove CBS News violted medical privacy and get them in big trouble in court is tell us the names of these patients.
Go ahead and identify them. We’ll wait.
The X-Rays of Others (Dr. Elaine Schattner is an oncologist, journalist and breast cancer survivor Posted: June 25, 2010 12:00 PM)
When Monroe was hospitalized in 1954, medical privacy laws were essentially non-existent. Now, a physician would have to ask a patient's permission before displaying her films before a classroom of students, on TV or the Web. The images would be stripped of any identifying labels.This story, on patient's rights and privacy, relates to that of another woman who received care in the same era. Henrietta Lacks, the subject of Rebecca Skloot's current best-seller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, died of cervical cancer at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. She was 31 years old and had five children. Without her explicit consent, physicians took malignant, ever-replicating cells from her tumor to establish valuable cell lines that have been used -- and sold -- for medical research ever since, while the family stayed impoverished for decades.
It seems ironic that Monroe, who was hospitalized for gynecological reasons and died childless, has no descendants to hold her records near, to intervene or somehow say "no, the x-rays are off-limits." Rather, it's her doctor's children who've cut the deal.
Would the parent of a child impailed on an antenna or a man with things in his rectum freely sign away his rights to keep such things off the web?
There are plenty of discussions of those who know doctors who’ve kept such copies (just as the clerks at Walgreens swipe dupes of the funny photos they want to take home).
If they are all willing to state upfront that no rights were compromised and that the patients always gave informed consensual release of the images, then there is no case.