This may be the first time a patient has documented a medical blacklisting.
This is another issue wilfully mischaracterized by the medical community The blacklist in medicine is not a written list. Physicians assume some basic level of honesty among their peers. They do not anticipate sinslike rape from colleagues and the deliberate obfuscation of such. This allows the white wall of silence to be turned into a black one with nothing more than a phone call or a nuance in a referral. Doctors, like members of any normal group, watch out for each other. If a patient never pays bills, or repeatedly files lawsuits, or habitually becomes violent, or travels around trying to get illegal prescriptions, one would expect a doctor who knew about it to warn colleagues.* But that kind of communication can result in blacklisting patients who need treatment. A patient being blacklisted can go from doctor to doctor to doctor without getting diagnosed or treated and never know why. Blacklisting can result in permanent harm or even death and can be criminally illegal. What are the odds of the police pursuing it? Near zero. How is a patient who figures out that it is going on to persuade anyone of it? Where will be the proof? Doctors create the record. And the records are created to protect doctors, not patients. defensive documentation The police don’t even know where to start looking. And state medical boards are run by other doctors to whom this looks like business-as-usual. The very suggestion of having been blacklisted will “strain credulity”.
Graph
Patient safety requires scrutiny
But look at this (click) to view)...
This is a graph 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 he didn’t know about about the appointment. What’s the opposite of patient safety?
It documents how it was done to me and how it can be done to you if you ever have a problem in medicine. Patients who understand it have a better chance of surviving in spite of it.
Overtness
It is not always as subtle as described above. Sometimes it is one physician blatantly telling another physician to find nothing wrong with a patient, to give no tests that could uncover injuries, and no referrals that could help the patient because anything found could indict a fellow physician.
Why would a physician risk his license and consciously ruin the life of a patient? Well, there’s really no risk. Who is going to report it? And who would believe the report? And who would do anything about it if they did? But still, what could be so awful that covering it up would be worth ruining the life of the patient? The statistics are elsewhere on this site about how many assaults, rapes and homicides are committed by healthcare workers each year against patients. Do you know why there are not a corresponding number of convictions for committing those crimes? One of the reasons is that no one in healthcare believes that their colleagues do these things, so they don’t believe they are covering up anything. They simply refuse to find or record the injuries and/or evidence of the crimes. No record of it is created in the first place. And the patient doesn’t get diagnosed or treated.
All it takes to blacklist patients is a hint that the patient might be making a case against a colleague. We patients cannot stop their gossip, and we cannot communicate among ourselves to overcome it without getting sued. All we can do is be aware that it is a problem, recognize that this is an unconscious routine for them, and fight for the right to speak, complain and seek help, protection and oversight.
Doctors are supposed to consider the seriousness of the malady, not the virtuousness of the patient.
Medicine is not like other professions. The consequences for its customers are too great. Doctors are supposed to treat villains as well as heroes, even if treating them enables villains to commit more villainy. Doctors are supposed to consider the seriousness of the malady, not the virtuousness of the patient. But that is not what they do. If you were to go to your primary care physician with wounds received when one of his colleagues raped you, your primary care physician would diagnose you as being crazy, and so would every other physician you went to. When you hear in the news about a patient who finally lashes out in frustration, the medical community unites in diagnosing the patient as being paranoid and crazy, and journalists always accept that without question. After all, the pronouncement has been made by physicians. Why would anyone question it?
The health care industry is a monopoly as much as the water company or electric utility company and has similar obligations. If power and water utilities refused service to someone, at least the victims would know that they had been cut off. Patients who are manipulated out of actual care, or even overtly declined it, are left in a more sinister darkness.
By the way, do you know what the police say when you try to report blacklisting? They say to contact the state medical board. Do you know what the state medical board in Ohio says when you report it to them? They investigate it for two years and then decide that the physician has not violated any provisions of law that their agency is charged with enforcing. You know what provision of law they are charged with at that point? The provision that requires them to send their investigation to the agency that is charged with enforcing that law. Which is the police. But they don’t. And who is there to enforce the law that requires them to? No one.
It should be noted that patients do not have this right. Patients get sued for defamation if they warn each other about medical professionals. Physicians are allowed to talk. Patients are not. This leaves patients ignorant and powerless and further shields medical professionals. When even their victims cannot report it, medical professionals are further shielded from normal inhibitions against acting out when experiencing lust or jealousy or anger or any of the other emotions to which they succumb from time to time.
People in medicine have a habit of mischaracterizing issues like this, in this case by declaring that there is no list or blacklist. Of course not. They are too deep in denial for something so overt. It is not that there is a written list of patients that doctors have decided to screw. It is their nearly complete faith in themselves and each other coupled with their nearly complete lack of faith in patients. Blind, self-serving biases allow them to be unaware of it when they are doing it.
A conspiracy, not a profession…Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away. – George Bernard Shaw on medicine.
It’s nothing new.
SOURCE:
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070702185744/http://www.patient-safety.com/blacklisting_patients.htm
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20060513110703/http://www.patient-safety.com/graph.htm
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