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
to have 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.
Orville Lynn Majors
Male nurse/serial killer
with no one reporting him.
In response to this page, I got an email from one of the
nurses who had been present while he was killing patients.
Have you ever noticed how much time and energy medicine
spends persuading us that they are the victims? I had posted only about six
sentences on this page about Orville Lynn Majors, just for a synopsis
of the case to remind readers of who he was when he was mentioned as an example. It was not
intended to be in depth or definitive. There is plenty available about him on
the web for those who wish to know more. But then I got an email from an anonymous
nurse who said she had been on the scene when Majors was murdering patients. It
is interesting as yet another example of medicine's view of the
world.
The short note about Majors on this page said that when he was off duty, people died only every 551.6 hours.
When he was on duty, a death occurred every 23.1 hours. Since no one tracks the
well-being of patients to see whether the care makes them better or worse as a
group, no one noticed - except for some nurses who were making bets as to which patient would die the next time Majors was
on duty. Did any of them report their concerns to a state board or agency? Did any of them leak anything to the police or the press?
Not for the first hundred murders or so.
A Response to Which We Are Used
After reading that note on this page, the anonymous nurse emailed me indignantly explaining that the nurses couldn't report it
for fear of losing their jobs. So I added here her explanation and said that
from a patient's perspective that appeared to be an example of
healthcare professionals valuing their own careers more than the
lives of their patients. The nurse read that and emailed again saying she misspoke.
She said that nurses did report it - to their supervisors.
If you,
dear reader, saw a colleague at work stab a customer (as, for instance,
Dr. Zarkin did), wouldn't you call the police? In medicine they
say they would, and they believe they would, but they don't, as example after
example testifies. So on this page I asked where else would people become aware
that a colleague was murdering customers and do no more than alert a supervisor?
The anonymous nurse wrote again saying that when the nurses
complained to their supervisors, they were told something would be done about it.
When nothing was, the nurses finally wrote an anonymous letter to
the police. How many patients have to be murdered in medicine before health care
professionals finally to go to the police? Apparently about a hundred. When I
wrote that on this page, she emailed indignantly again telling me that if those nurses
had reported it they could have been sued, which is why she was writing anonymously. She said they could have lost their jobs, their careers and even their
families. She demanded that I name one time I had been in that situation
in order to understand what that is like.
Could this nurse articulate the subjectivity of health care
professionals any more clearly? She has no apparent awareness of how often
patients are threatened with such suits by their health care providers. Such
obliviousness to the world that they create for patients is normal in medicine.
People Believe Themselves to be Objective
Patients too are surprised by it when they become victims of
adverse events in medicine and begin to hear the rattling of the sabers of risk
management threatening lawsuits if the patients tell anyone. Nurses and doctors
are not informed of it when those sabers are rattled. Those health care
professionals not only are insulated from, but also indifferent to, these things
that medicine does to patients. This anonymous nurse has no awareness of the
world that medicine creates for its patients.
Soon after injured
patients discover medicine's insulation and indifference, they often have to face the
equivalent of hatred from their caregivers. The anonymous emailer doesn't know that medicine routinely threatens patients with lawsuits to shut them up, that
almost all injured patients end up in the situation she challenges us to name
one time we have experienced. She also appears unaware of the darker and more
sinister things that are done to patients in the name of protecting healthcare
professionals. That too is covered elsewhere on this site where she could
read it, yet she barked at me to do a little research to become more aware of
how bad the situation is for nurses.
Isn't it her job to do a little research to become aware of
what things are like for her patients? Isn't it interesting that she appears to
think it should be the reverse?
First Priority
Anyone know of any instances in which 100
nurses were murdered before anyone reported it to anyone who would do anything
about it? How many nurses get physically injured and cannot get treatment
because no one in medicine will diagnose their injuries (don't know how hard it
can be to get iatrogenic injuries diagnosed? - see
blacklisting)? How many nurses even know
that that is
a problem for injured patients? Even upon learning it, you can count on their
either not believing it or deciding that it must be so rare that it is
unimportant, even after having been present for a hundred murders. As with this
nurse.
Name one time when we have been in that situation? Try being
injured and deteriorating, watching yourself become disabled without being able
to get medical attention while the people who did it to you are dragging you to
court to defend yourself on such short notice that you haven't got time to find
a lawyer (risk management intentionally orchestrates it to work out that way).
Do you know what it is like to be so unwell that you cannot manage your own care, or
work, or take care of your family, and now you have to represent yourself before
a judge? You are in pain and sick but you have to get your mind clear and free
of pain killers to defend everything you have while your spouse frantically
calls friends and relatives and goes through the phone book trying to find a
lawyer who is available on such short notice. In court, you face the nurse or
doctor who injured you and watch him/her sobbing about how his/her reputation
could be hurt by your complaint. They have a team of lawyers and a battery of
witnesses who will testify. You cannot even get a diagnosis of your injuries to
show that you have injuries. Eventually, with enough money and enough persistence,
you might be able to, but not in time to defend yourself, and not in time to heal
the injuries. When left untreated for too long they become inoperable scar tissue or worse. And legal issues take up the
time, energy and money you should have been spending just trying to get healed.
Name one time we have been threatened with a suit? We can
name more than one. We also can name sins and injustices more life-ruining than
law suits that were brought by nurses and doctors against the patients they
injured. Apparently it is all done under the mantra of "You have to protect
yourself from lawsuits" and the best defense is a good offense. Does risk
management tell nurses how it handles the sins and errors committed by nurses? Of course
not. They insulate them. So healthcare professionals feel innocent and aggrieved
with no appreciation for damage they may do to patients about whom they
believe they care. The anonymous nurse imagines we won't
even be able to name one time we have been in that situation. We wish it were
only one time. And we wish physical injuries had not been part of it. And we
wish we had been able to get treatment for them. We gladly would have traded
places with her.
Long Term Tracking
If no one in medicine knew Majors was murdering patients for
the first 50 or 100 murders it is because medicine defiantly refuses to care
about or know about the long term results it has on patients. Medicine doesn't
learn even from lethal events. It has no awareness of
its own failure rate or success rate and continues behaving in ways that suit its own
purposes rather than learning what works in the long term for patients. How many
nurses know how their patients are doing several years later? Try asking
surgeons what the success rate is for various surgeries. They have no reliable
data but they speak as though they do. They make up statistics based on
anecdotal evidence. That's good enough for them. They are not among the hundreds
of thousands of patients
killed unnecessarily each year in medicine (320,000 according to the
July 15, 2008 issue of
Annals of
Internal Medicine, see summary
here, but others have estimated that it is double that).
The anonymous nurse said that when "Union" bought the
hospital, "they didnt want anyone who worked there in any position any longer.If
they couldn't find a reason to fire you or make you resign, they bullied you
out." She says that anyone even mentioned in the court proceedings does not
work there anymore. Mobbing and bullying
in medicine is covered elsewhere on this site. It is an issue that gets too
little attention. And it is one of the reasons people in medicine do not report,
even when reporting could prevent patients from being murdered.
She says, "They are not just fired, they are blackballed
from ever working again. A lot of them are now on welfare, unable to find work,
losing there homes, families, kids, everything. I'm not only talking that one
hospital but all hospitals! These people are being fired for do the right thing,
not failing to report."
If she had done a little research and read this site, she
would see that that is one of the major points this site makes. Failing
to report is not what they get fired for. Failing to report kills patients, but
that is not what they get fired for. They work in a system that fires them for
reporting. That's too bad. Reporting is what saves the lives of patients, but
they get fired for that.
Normalcy
Not reporting is what is normal in medicine. See
Janice Scully, M.D. for an example of how it
is that only 1.5% of adverse events get
reported in medicine. When the problem is criminal, the rate is even
lower, as is covered elsewhere on this site. Medicine is a world in which a hundred patients
need to get murdered
before someone finally goes outside of the system to stop it.
There needs to be a more well-known and more realistic
complaint system. Currently there are only pretenses of such. There needs to be
one that isn't run by healthcare professionals, and especially not by risk management
departments. They both are among the ones who cover up
these problems in order to protect their own at the expense of their patients. The
culture in medicine is dedicated to that. Just look at how state medical boards
handle the complaints of patients (see OSMB). There needs
to be a complaint process run by someone who actually is on the side of
patients.
Reporting
There is another way to collect at least some of the data
that health care professionals won't report (see the link above about
1.5%). It never will be collected by
health care professionals, as has been proved year after year. It has to be
collected in spite of the refusal of health care professionals to report it. Doctors and nurses don't report each other
or themselves except in the rarest of cases. We need to get the information
elsewhere in order to make medicine safe and effective and affordable.
In two years more than 160 suspicious deaths happened during
Major's watch.
That's one and a half per week. In medicine there is no routine
mechanism that would notice this. It wasn't until he got sloppy and left tracks
that you didn't have to be paying
any particular attention to find that someone finally noticed. When they did, they
didn't call the police. They told a supervisor and then watched as more patients
were murdered.
As this nurse has demonstrated, people in medicine view my
reporting information like this
as a war on them rather than as a problem on which they need to work. This nurse
emailed saying that millions of
people every year go to hospitals without having terrible things happen. One
hears that a lot in medicine. Someone should remind them that millions of people
every year drove cars safely before there were brake lights, turn signals, safety
glass, padded dash boards, seat belts, air bags, impact reducing unibody
construction, traffic lights, stop signs and speed limits. Millions of people
drove cars without terrible things happening before there were laws against
drunk driving. The problem is all of the people to whom terrible things did
happen.
Protect the Patients
Medicine is responsible for more accidental injury and death
than all other sources combined, but that is not the worst of it. In medicine,
they won't protect patients even from intentional harm - even murder.
Having this nurse become indignant when this patient didn't understand why
she didn't protect those patients would be stupefying if this patient
had not already heard these same arguments from numerous health care professionals
rationalizing similar instances of protecting themselves at the expense of their
patients.
Every time they don't report negative information in medicine
they are protecting themselves at the expense of the lives of patients. They
don't see it that way. Because they are not the ones who are dying.
Of the 147 elderly patients in his care, 130 died in a relatively brief span of time. If he had killed only, say, half of the patients in his care, or if he only had abused them, rather than murdering them, say by maiming or disfiguring or sexually assaulting
them, he could have had a normal career, like
Donald Harvey did for a couple of decades and James Burt
did for a couple of decades. If too many complaints came in, Majors merely would
have been transferred to someplace else, as with Charles Cullen
or Genene Jones or Michael
Swango. Majors merely is another example of a miscreant in medicine finally
getting stopped only because the scale of what he was doing became more than
even the medical community was willing to cover up.
Statistics and examples prove that, but in medicine they are
in denial about that. They believe they report everything. Patients need to worry when their care is entrusted to people so out of
touch with reality.
The nurse fired off one last fusillade ending with the
admonition for me not to respond. She knows she is right and patients are wrong
and does not want to hear any thoughts patients might have to the contrary.
That's actually a typical response to which we are used. We just don't usually
share such responses on the web.
The Clinton, Indiana hospital changed its name from Vermillion County Hospital to West Central Community Hospital.