To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
-R. Buckminster Fuller
One of the beliefs that patients have been force fed by medicine is the idea that medicine is too complicated for patients to understand and make sane decisions. It is in medicine’s interest to believe that and to keep you deluded enough to believe it too. When you are getting a hip replacement, they are required to educate you so that you can make the decision about which one to get. They explain to you the two different ways that the operation is done – information that would be useful if you were trying to pass a course in medical school but of no use for the decision you are about to make.
If you were trying to make a decision about which of two cars to buy, two cars you had not seen and knew nothing about, and got all of your information from the person selling it to you, would it help you at all for that person to tell how each one was made? Or would it have been better if you could have learned that one of the two had a history of blowing up more than any other car in history?
For twenty years millions of patients around the world were told about how two different hip replacements were made and installed. Do you think a single one of the doctors “educating” those patients mentioned that the metal on metal one would put toxic levels of cobalt into their blood streams, and that perhaps a third of those patients would come down with dementia, blindness and/or heart failure as a result? What patients need to know is what has been the outcome for other patients. A year ago? Five years ago? Ten years ago? And not the general outcome for all the millions of patients who got it. What has been the outcome for patients with this operator in this facility?
No one in medicine tracks anything like that. They do not want to know it themselves. It is not in their records. It especially is not in their memories. Only 2% of what goes wrong in medicine gets in the record accurately. 93% never get in the record at all no matter how overt and damaging (see medical reporting). Violent crimes committed against patients in front of witnesses get no mention in any record. It can end the career of a health care worker who does put it in the record . A year later none of the witnesses even will remember it, such is the nature of human memory. It is only the traumatic memories of victims that are immutable. 40 years later war veterans who have been victims of such repeat the exact same story they told minutes after it happened. All other memories humans automatically rewrite to suit their own purposes over and over again as time goes on.
What that means for patients is that medicine will disable the ability of patients to make informed decisions forever. That suits the purposes of people working in medicine. That is just the way people are. It does not mean people in medicine are evil. It means they are normal. They are not saints. They are humans. Humans perceptions and memories are self-interested. One of the problems is that in medicine they believe they are not. They believe they are objective and selfless.
If you wanted to hold a contest to find the most subjective person on earth, the first requirement to gain entry into the contest would be to believe that you are objective. People who imagine that they are objective are among the most subjective people on earth. If people in medicine were not, if they truly held the interests of patients above their own, they would have explained to patients that metal on metal hip implants were toxic. Instead, they stayed in line with one of the mantras of medicine that says “Don’t go looking for problems” and did not put two and two together when their patients came back with cobalt poisoning.
Medicine unnecessarily kills as many people per week as firearms kill per year (see Preventable Deaths). Medicine is the most dangerous place most people in the USA ever go. It is outrageous that patients have no ability to see what and where the problems are so that they can avoid them. It is now possible to collect the information that will enable them to do that. This is not “big data.” It is small counting. And it is what this site is about.
Solutions ……….|………. Problems
|
……………………. | ………… Myth #1
|
Patient Agency… | …………………….
|
Nequamitis ……. | ……………………
|
……………………. | Conflict/Interest
|
……………………. | ………… Loyalty
|
……………………. | ..Wall of Silence
|
……………… …… | …….Blacklisting
|
…………………… | ….Psych of Care
|
…………………… | … Transparency
|
…………………… | .. Charles Cullen
|
…………………… | Orville L Majors
|
…………………… | ……… Kayshyap
|
…………………… | ………….. OSMB
|
…………………… | ….. Semmelweis
|
…………………… | . Benjamin Rush
|
…………………… | …. Government
|
Patients Boards. | ……………………
|
Campaign … | ………………
“If we can get just 10% of people to be smart patients, it will change the system.” – Mehmet Oz, surgery professor.