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.
Examples
It says a lot that there is a
National Task Force on Violence Against
Healthcare Providers
but no such force protecting patients
If you want to understand a system, look at how it handles its worst moments. The conditions that enable these dramatic cases to occur also allow thousands more abuses to occur with no one noticing other than the victims. And who listens to victims in medicine?
No patient safety initiative can be successful that does not respond to the abuses and depravities that will be committed by any group of people that thinks it can get away with such sins. A system that cannot solve crimes cannot solve less sinister dangers. Medicine lacks the integrity and will to address either, as
this list of examples demonstrates. Dismissing them as "one-offs" is one of the ways it avoids admitting to its problems and solving them.
This might be one of the reasons that it has been said that medicine is the vocation that supports crime. If the crimes are not
dramatic and covered by the press, the crimes and the victims are dismissed.
If you wanted to understand conditions in prisons
but heard only the voices of guards and wardens,
you would be missing the most important voice.
If you want to say something about any of my
sites, my phone number is on almost every page. So is my
email address. There even
are Feedback Forms where you can communicate
anonymously. I am listening. I will be sensitive to what you say.