Full Table of Contents
_______________
Abbreviated
Table of Contents
Home Page
Patient Safety
Silence vs
Safety
Silenced
White wall
of Silence
Silencing
Conflict Of
Interest
Psychology of
Providers
Subjectivity
Blacklisting
Nurse survey
Loyalty
Mobbing and
bullying
Trust Us
Defensive
documenting
Report Rate
Risk
managemnt
SOAP
Management
Hospitals
Crime in
medicine
Sexual Abuse
Liability
Limitations
Free Speech
for Patients
Exploitation
OSMB Medical
Boards
Mammography
solutions
Medical errors
Medical Complaints
One number
Links
Injured patients who want to help and be heard, click here.
Thomas Jefferson said that given the choice between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would choose newspapers.
In medicine we have government without newspapers. Patients cannot find out what they need to know to make informed choices. No one in medicine records or reports the information patients need to know the most. So patients will have to do it.
Table of Contents
< Truth / Justice / Patient
Safety >
It's a path
I'm reorganizing this site. It does not have a linear
progression anymore.
The best way to proceed might be to click below on topics that interest you.
Home Page
- Patients need institutional support
Synopsis - an out-of-date attempt to summarize the site in a linear read,
but it needs updating
Home Page Addendum
Journal - Current diary of the path to an operation expected in the future.
Patient Safety
Silence versus safety - trends in patient safety
Silenced -
the community thinks in stories
White wall of silence - a matter of
culture and written public policy
Silencing
patient advocates in healthcare
Conflict of Interest -
the unacknowledged elephant in the room
Psychology
of Healthcare Professionals
Subjectivity
Blacklisting Patients
Graph
Nurse survey - frequency of reporting
Nurse training - another reason they don't
report
Loyalty - why no one in medicine ever will report
Mobbing and bullying - the community punishes reporting
/ Trust us /
Defensive documentation
- protects medical personnel, not patients
Risk management - are patients the enemy?
SOAP -
guide for what physicians are supposed to record
Management Issues -
enforced institutional ignorance
XXXXXX hospitals - historical source for culture of silence, (had to
delete it because of backlash)
Crime in medicine -
Sexual Abuse - no structures protect patients
from miscreants in medicine
Liability Limitations - making targets
out of a class of patients
Freedom of Speech for Patients - Patients should be as protected as physicians.
Exploitation - It's not on the map.
OSMB - Ohio State Medical Board
Disciplinary Action Chart for 2001
Disciplinary Action Codes
Citizen oversight group - doctors cannot
police doctors
Oversight - doctors want outside oversight for those who provide to them
OSMB Investigators
National Practitioner Data Bank
mammography - why the government cannot make
medicine safer on its own
MammoSite - why care givers do
not make medicine safer
solutions
medical
errors
one number - reporting needs to be encouraged
HHS Hospital Compare - It's good to see more of this happening.
Josie King Foundation - The problem for most patient safety initiatives.
Examples - Murder is a bellwether. Murders committed by hospital staff are said to be the easiest kind of serial killing to get away with. The same conditions that allow those crimes enable thousands of other errors and sins.
Dr. Benjamin Rush - Founding Father. Famous physician. Centuries of silence.
Dr. Allan Zarkin - Doctors are humans. They do bad
things.
Dr. Liana Gedz - A victim testifies before Congress.
Dr. James Burt - The system removes normal inhibitors.
Dr.Arthur Richard Schramm - No one
checks even when there are red flags
Dr. Graeme Reeves - victims
stonewalled by health authorities and laughed at by police.
Dr. Vikas Kashyap - same old, same
old.
Dr. Michael Swango - Even murderers are protected in
medicine.
Donald Harvey - Sometimes they are orderlies or nurses aides.
Orville Lynn Majors - A lack of moderation can get noticed.
Charles Cullen, RN - The system lacks a way to spread the word.
Dr. Gary Malakoff - An M.D. is a get-out-off-jail-free card.
Dr. David C Arndt - Surprised anyone would be upset.
Richard W. Gibson - Stealing patient's identity.
Genene Jones, LVN - What does a serial killer look like?
Dr. Harold Shipman - What to learn from the world's most prolific serial killer.
Catherine Wood and Gwen Graham - Nurses' "Murder
Game."
Dr. Michael E. Sachs - An example of how helpless patients are to find out about their healthcare.
Dr. Federico Castro-Moure - Another glimmer of how much power and protection doctors are used to.
Other examples on which you might want to do searches:
Beverley Allitt - Britain. At least 4 murders.
Richard Angelo - Long Island, New York, at least 10 murders
Robert Diaz - Riverside, California, 12 murders
Kristen Gilbert -
Massachusetts. "If my
patient dies, can I get off work early?" 350 murders possible.
Terri Rachals - Albany, Georgia. 23-year old intensive care nurse. 6 counts of murder.
Brian Rosenfeld - Florida, 23 possible murders
Jane Toppan - Massachusetts, at least 31 murders
Efren Saldivar - California, at least 6 murders
Sigmund Freud - Recent research
shows he put personal interest in front of wellbeing of patients.
To whom to complain?
The Back Surgeon - fiction sometimes is the best way to make problems understandable
Medical Complaints Homepage - How and to whom to
complain in medicine (it isn't easy or effective).
Medical Information
Release Form
List of State Medical
Boards
Complaint form
Miscellaneous
It's a path - we must be allowed to know
what's true
Chalk Outline - "Save the
Patients" symbol
One of the many things they won't let you read
Open letter to Daniel Shore
Universal Insurance -
Concerns about government involvement in managing healthcare.
Links
Click links to see other sites, many of which were set up by victims of adverse events in medicine. Many of the most important and most progressive institutions in the world were set up in the same way, as responses to specific and horrible abuses. The Magna Charta was a social revolution against the specific abuses of a specific tyrant. The Magna Charta was the insistence that steps be taken to end such abuses. The bulk of the Declaration of Independence is a recounting of the abuses of George III and a declaration of the institutions that would be established to correct those abuses. Many of the web sites set up by injured patients are no different. The people who injure them continue to injure patients with an indifference encapsulated in hubris. They do not listen to their victims. They stymie, silence and dispense with them, frequently branding them as cranks. The story tends to be the same time after time. It can be seen in the sites set up by some of their victims.
Intentional Harm
Is this even on the radar of anyone in medicine? Has it ever been mentioned in any important bill in Congress? Victims of it cannot create web sites making people aware of it because when they do they get sued.
That's too bad because crime in medicine could be the most important issue in medicine. On this site, the point of discussing crime in medicine is to shed light on patient safety problems. The conflicts of interest of providers is the fundamental problem. Criminal law is the first step for addressing that, but the systems, culture, mindsets and habits protect even crime in medicine. As long as that is the case, there is no hope for progress on the biggest issues. If I were to relate in detail an instance of sex abuse and violence in a hospital and how depraved the caregivers were and how they got away with it, it would be to shed light. The perpetrators of that instance are church-goers with children. They are respected members of their community (who in medicine isn't?), but have passions that destroy people's lives - something they can get away with because of where they work. What they do afterwards to silence their victims is the most despicable of all. How this works is important to know. We hear the statistics on how much assault, rape and homicide there is in medicine. What we don't hear is why virtually no one is reported, let alone indicted for those crimes, why the criminals are allowed to keep committing crimes, and why we so rarely hear from the victims. If you can shed light on that, you have a duty to. When you are a victim, it is because no previous victim shed that light to protect you. For all of the errors and neglects causing the 195,000 unnecessary deaths each year, and many times more unnecessary injuries, the beginning of the solution is getting a handle on the intentional ones.
* * *
In 1968 CIA analyst Sam Adams was sent to Saigon. There he discovered that intentionally incorrect information was being generated. He did not go public with that and so doctored information was sent to the president. It could have ruined his career and could have landed him in jail to go public with it so he didn't. Years later he said that if he had gone public, the Vietnam Memorial would be only half as big as it is because the war would have stopped sooner and half of the people named on that monument would not have been killed. He never got over his remorse for that. When you know the truth, you have a duty to tell it for the common good, even when they make you suffer for doing it. It's too bad there is almost no one in medicine interested enough in the well being of patients to obey that ethic. They won't even let patients tell what the patients have learned. The number of lives Sam Adams could have saved was about 25,000. In medicine they kill that many people unnecessarily every month. The people in medicine who keep their abuses quiet, and who silence the patients who try to reveal them, are far worse than Sam Adams.
"Medicine hates its victims."
If that doesn't ring true in the center of your heart
your knowledge of patient safety is only theoretical.
If you flat out don't believe it, you probably work in medicine.