Why Doctors are Bad for Your Health - Part III

Well, apparently President Obama agrees!

Agrees with what? you ask.

That doctors, or rather hospitals, CAN be bad for your health!

'One recent study published in the journal Health Affairs estimated that 1 in 3 hospital patients experienced an "adverse event" such as being given the wrong medication, acquiring an infection or receiving the wrong surgical procedure." (McClatchy News Service).

On April 29,2011, the president took an important step toward rectifying this endemic quality of health care issue when he finalized plans to reward hospitals that provide high quality health care. These steps are a by-product of the new health care reform act the president signed into law last year.

In other words, hospitals that reduce that 1-in-3 ratio of mistakes and inappropriate treatment will receive more money from Medicare than those institutions that continue to misdiagnose and fail to take adequate precautions against secondary infections such as Staph and others

We all know of people have gone into hospital for a surgical procedure only to contract pneumonia or some viral infection that delays and complicates recovery from that surgery.

The hope is by hitting hospitals where it hurts, that is in the pocket-book, the Obama administration will gain traction in a bid to improve the quality of health care without sacrificing the many benefits that Medicare confers on Americans.

Why Doctors are Bad for Your Health - Part II

In my last Blog I noted that an 85-year family friend, who has since died, saw very little of doctors during his life on Earth. Maybe he'll meet a few in Heaven. Until he suffered a massive stroke earlier this year, it was thought that he had not been to a doctor since he was in the Service during World War II. Not strictly accurate, I am told; but not too far from the truth. Once, aged 45 or so, he voluntarily visited a doctor, for something specific. About 10 years ago he broke his wrist - so there was a doctor involved for that. Doctors wanted to operate on the wrist to repair it, but he said NO. And not on religious grounds.

Until well into the twentieth century medicine was such that a visit to a doctor was best avoided.

It had been worse in the 19th Century, as military campaigns suffered huge casualties due to disease. Soldiers suffered at the hands of surgeons who, in many cases, were little more than meat butchers. During the American Civil War more soldiers died of disease than perished in battle, despite the terrible slaughter at battles such as Antietam and Gettysburg.

So are doctors bad for your health? I don't necessarily believe it, but I have many reasons to avoid hospitals and hospitalization.

Not least because I could come out missing the wrong limb, or be misdiagnosed with a terminal illness. But what scares me also about hospitals is the fear that I could go in for some minor procedure; and nearly die from a staph infection, as happened to my wife's aunt a few years ago.

Doctors are human beings who can take on a God-like status: which ill-fits them. May be it is a power thing: you know being able to dispense life and death. We all know good, kind and capable doctors. We also know doctors who are arrogant, teacher-knows-best types, with lousy bedside manners. Competence may excuse a bad bedside manner; but only rarely. After all, a patient should be treated as a human being by members of the Caring Profession.

A Code of Silence

Here is what bothers me about doctors collectively. Their code of silence. They back each other to the hilt, when they shouldn't.

Take the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia back street abortionist, whose butchery and ineptitude practiced on desperate women, was covered up by the very doctors who had to sort out his surgical mess. Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which operates two hospitals within a mile of Gosnell's clinic in West Philadelphia, saw at least six of those patients - two of whom died.

But, according to a report by the Associated Press, 'they largely failed in their legal and ethical duties to report their peer's incompetence." Much in the same way that certain Roman Catholic bishops colluded with pedophile priests under their jurisdiction, which, as a Catholic, leaves a horrid, bitter taste in my mouth.

"Why did these doctors who treated these women fail to report a fellow physician who was so obviously endangering his patients," wrote the Philadelphia grand jurors who, according to the same AP report, recommended a slew of charges against Gosnell and his staff.

Maybe the problems is specific to Philadelphia's health care system. My son, for one, had a very bad experience concerning psychiatric health care in the Philadelphia health care system. The source of this woeful tale is a registered psychiatrist who took a laissez-faire approach to monitoring my son's well being after prescribing him a powerful medication to treat his depression.

That hands-off attitude nearly proved fatal to my son. Judging from responses he and I have got from that trick cyclist, he apparently could care less about my son.

So maybe my family friend was on to something.