Ohio State Medical Board InvestigatorsNo medical training. No external scrutiny.In fairness to the investigators, if any were hired who are motivated and intelligent, for how long could they continue to invest themselves in their investigations knowing that their work is for naught? The state medical board of Ohio doesn't discipline anyone on the basis of complaints filed by patients, so why would an investigator stick out his or her neck? How often can an investigator arrive on the scene before the trail is too cold anyway? A patient reporting a crime to the state medical board of Ohio is mailed a form and told to gather a wealth of documents. By the time the state medical board of Ohio receives it and sorts through it, the witnesses will have done at least a thousand more medical procedures and have trouble recollecting anything. If they do recollect and there is no other way for the state medical board of Ohio to avoid disciplining a physician, the Ohio State Medical Board has been known to sit on a case until the physician finally retired. It also has been known to get out of disciplining a physician by deciding that as the state medical board of Ohio it has no authority to enforce criminal law. That would be the province of the police. When investigators see investigations of patients conducted by the state medical board of Ohio never result in discipline, what motivation can they have for ruffling feathers and making enemies by actually uncovering problems? The investigators have to face patients first and everyone else last. They don't have to sit down face to face with the patient whose life has been ruined and explain why no one believes him or her. Whether or not investigators at the state medical board of Ohio make honest efforts to discover anything must remain confidential under Section 4731.22(F)(5) of the Ohio Revised Code. So they cannot even get credit for trying from the one constituency that would want them to, the patients. For sheer sanity anyone would have to become an automaton who filled in blanks and moved on without making a serious attempt to discover anything. I am told that there are 22 investigators at the state medical board of Ohio. Almost every question I ask about those investigators cannot be answered because of confidentiality. However, I do know the name of the one investigating the complaints I filed with the state medical board of Ohio. I was able to find out that he is a retired police officer. When he was a police officer he wasn't smart enough to be an investigator. He tried for years to become one. When they finally relented and gave him a chance, he screwed it up so badly that he was demoted. That is is not done lightly. That demotion reduced his pay and reduced his retirement benefits (so he needed to work during retirement). A former colleague of his told me that the word of mouth on my investigator was that he couldn't write a parking ticket without screwing it up. I'm also told that back at police headquarters when they learned he had become an investigator with the state medical board of Ohio, in the office there was spontaneous, collective laughter. Would an organization that honestly wanted to find the problems hire this person? He has a high school degree and no medical training. It was up to me, a patient with no medical training, to explain the medical aspects of the case to him. I still was figuring it out myself. When he went to investigate the case, he asked the questions I asked him to ask (or so he told me) and no others. So I was conducting the Ohio State Medical Board's investigation through him. And I didn't know how. What patient would? More details of this (that I wasn't supposed to be able to find out) will be covered here eventually. By the way, when he told me that he had asked exactly what I had asked him to ask, I asked him what questions those were. He told me that he could not tell me because of confidentiality. He could not quote back to me what I had said to him because of confidentiality? They are so used to hiding behind "confidentiality." The whole process seemed design to placate me, not find problems, seek justice or protect patients. He did not even find the paper trail that I told him about. So I got the documents myself and sent them to him. Months later when I telephoned his superior I was told, with exasperation, that I'd buried them in a stack of documents. It was twenty pages, but apparently that was too much for them because they later said they were closing the case. So I reduced the 20 pages to a graph that in one page visually summarized what the documents showed. With that they continued reviewing the case for a while longer (before closing it). In other words, not only is it necessary for the patient to find the evidence and run the investigation, but it also is necessary for the patient to digest the matter for the state medical board of Ohio and make it into a presentation. What patient other than me other can take the time to stay on top of them like this to try to get them to do their job? I am dubious about whether there is anything that could be done to get them to do it. Monitoring by a external group I suppose might help some, but I doubt any group run by healthcare professionals ever will have the perspective and motivation necessary to protect patients. I am doing this not merely for my need for justice, but also as a test case. The citizens of Ohio need someone to figure out how to get justice and then explain it to them. The citizens of the country need someone to explain why mandatory reporting laws are useless. The State and Federal Government need someone to show examples of why current systems don't function. Ohio courts need someone to point out the inequity of liability limitations that make it so that someone with an MD can commit blatant violence against a patient and be protected by statutory liability limits, while the victim of the violence is not protected and is silenced by being subjected to unlimited liabilities merely for speaking about the violence. It's biting off a lot. It is my new unremunerative career. I've succeeded at more of it than I ever thought I would. But they keep finding ways to silence me. They even tried to put me in jail, and nearly succeeded. So that future patients are not so silenced, next we need to pass laws and fight for court precedents that allow patients to speak about their healthcare (see freedom of speech for patients) so that we will be able to learn what we need to know to manage our healthcare and make medicine less dangerous for patients and less safe for operators who cannot be trusted. Hit your back button to return to where
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