Patient safety requires scrutiny,
but medicine prohibits it.
This might be the first time that a patient documented blacklisting in medicine. Others now are trying. Once people see how this is done they will have a better chance of recognizing it if it happens to them. Typically patients are persuaded by caregivers that be the best that could be done for them was done, even while making sure no one does anything addtional for them lest the truth become known.
This is not hard for them to accomplish. No one in medicine wants to diagnose injuries incurred in medicine. In the first place, they usually do not believe in them. They believe such claims are frivolous. In the second place, they themselves will be punished by the rest of the medical community if they do diagnose the injuries.
Once in a while it is overt enough for a patient to see what is going on, but that is rare, at least among the hundreds of injured patients with whom I have spoken. Typically patients believe that caregivers have the well-being of patients as their first priority and do not understand why no one diagnoses their injuries.
That is what happened to me. If I had understood that blacklisting even was possible, I might have been able to find away around it before it was too late and might not be disabled now.
This is a graph (click to enlarge) of my appointments with doctors over a period of years showing that every time my primary care physician was involved, the appointments never resulted in testing or diagnosis. I had to leave town without a referral to escape his influence. It took years to figure out that I was being blacklisted and then learn how to escape it. The moment I sought treatment without his knowing about it, I got diagnosed, and continued to every time after that when he didn’t know about it.
Flip Flop
There was one appointment when I showed him the diagnoses I had gotten in other cities in prestigious hospitals that revealed internal traumatic injuries consistent with the assault I had been describing. He became remorseful and apologetic. He even sent me to the physician he should have sent me to years earlier, the first time I went to him for help with this.
Flop Flip
Unfortunately, his having manipulated me out of care all of that time appears to have so violated what he is able to accept for his own self-image, that he was grasping for any excuse to change his mind and decide, once again, that the problem must be me and that my claim must be frivolous. He started finding ways to imagine that every symptom I’d ever had, even ones that had nothing to do with this case, must all be in my head, no matter how solid diagnoses of them were. Like the duodenal ulcers of which there were photos taken during a colonoscopy. He decided they must be figments of my imagination.
The physician to whom he had just sent me, the one with the specific expertise necessary to actually help me, had diagnosed injuries consistent with the assault I had been describing and tried hard to get me to tell him who had battered me in this way. I was too afraid to name the surgeon. I had been so intimidated by the hospital with the threats of lawsuits. At the time wasn’t sure I could tell even another physician without additional legal problems. Risk management misinforms patients to cause them to worry about that.
But after that one appointment with the correct physician, my primary care physician managed to find a way to flip flop and decide that even injuries of which there were arteriography and Doppler ultrasound and other forms of diagnosis must really be only in my head.
So my primary physician called that physician up and told him he had been wrong and they must change course and pretend to help without helping. I no longer could get any meaningful help from the best physician to help me.
People can believe or disbelieve anything that fits in with their own interests. Caregivers have a strong need to believe they are doing good. They are well practiced at the mental gymnastics necessary to maintain the self images they like.
What’s the opposite of patient safety?
It turns out that my doctor is friends with the surgeon who, in a moment of anger, chose to injure me by violently assaulting me while I was tied down and helpless. Few people know how to inflict internal injuries that ruin your life better than a vascular surgeon.
My doctor merely was doing what all doctors do. He protected his friend. If my doctor had allowed me to get my injuries diagnosed, it not only would have enabled me to get treatment before it was too late, but it also could have indicted his friend. He opted to maintain doctor safety at the expense of patient safety, and managed to find a way to believe that he was doing good when he did that.
At the time I didn’t know that that is the routine in medicine. Since then hundreds of injured patients have called me. And numerous journal articles have provided peer reviewed information about how seldom accurate information is recorded in medicine.
They are supposed to treat the patient in front of them no matter how much they might not want to, but that ethic, and the well-being of patients, is not as important to them as the well-being of health care professionals.
Treatable injuries became inoperable scar tissue during the years that I pleaded for help while getting only the runaround. I don’t give up easily. It took a long time, but I finally managed to put two and two together and figure out that someone was preventing me from getting diagnosed. This awareness did not result from my being clever. Mostly it resulted from caregivers inadvertently tipping their hands.
After becoming aware of what was going on, I knew what the barriers to getting treatment were and was able to find ways around them, much to the visible dismay of my primary care physician (to read what those barriers are, click blacklisting). I escaped their influence and got diagnosed in other cities, back before electronic records made that even more difficult.
Witnesses
Eventually I happened to stumble on witnesses, people working in health care who did not hide the fact that he telephoned them and told them not to treat me. I directed the state medical board to them. With all that I provided to them the state medical board could not dismiss this case for a lack of evidence, which is their usual routine (see OSMB), so they sat on it for a year (delay being in the favor of caregivers) and then decided that they were not charged with enforcing the laws applicable to this case.
Their routine is to require patients to get information that patients cannot get. It took years, but I had been around this block with them when complaining about the original assault, and the sex abuse by a nurse that provoked the surgeon into assaulting me, and, when I finally was knowledgeable enough to recognize it, the last doctors to conduct exams as though they were kangaroo courts designed to avoid finding the injuries.
Now I was complaining about the blacklisting and how it had resulted in additional injuries. I had witnesses, hostile ones, but ones who would testify against me in a way that would indict the people who blacklisted me. And I had diagnostic proof of the injuries. All these are things that could have been very useful even in a court of law if any lawyer had seen fit to use them to defend me.
The state medical board could not dismiss this case for lack of evidence. So they sat on it for a year and then dismissed it as being a case they are not authorized to enforce since it was criminal in nature – something they had known since day one.
This is another of their routines, as it turns out. They accept cases they are not authorized to accept and then delay them until they are too old for anyone to do anything about them.
Silenced
The first amendment is supposed to enable us to publish things that are true. The paper trail proves that what I say is true. And it merely is a record of appointments with doctors and what resulted from them. They might not like what it shows, but it is merely publishing their own written record. So it is the truth as recorded by them. But lawsuits and the threat of additional lawsuits prevent me from warning other patients of the who and where of all of this. If anyone would produce this graph in court, it would go a long way to defending me. But they are so well funded and armed and allied with the people who are supposed to protect patients. I’m just telling the truth, but what they don’t want patients to do patients don’t get to do. Patients have no dog in this fight.
We must establish the truth and proceed to justice so that patients may be safe.
Physicians can warn other physicians about patients and blacklist them to the point of causing injury, while patients cannot warn other patients about physicians without getting sued – a major inequity crippling patient safety. This is part of the root of why quality does not improve and costs do not come down in medicine. Not only do they report almost no accurate information themselves (see Medical Reporting), they also prevent patients from doing it.
There is no one on the side of patients when things go wrong. Patients need a dog in this fight. Patients need State Patients Boards and Community Patients Agencies.