MD Whistleblower

Photo Credit Who says one person can’t make a difference? This past week, I personally set back health care reform. No, I wasn’t attending a ‘tea party’ or decrying Obamacare in a venomous letter to the editor. I single-handedly bent the health care cost curve in the wrong direction. I performed an unnecessary medical test on a hospitalized patient, which exposed her to risk and cost the system money. Why did I do this? Personal enrichment? Fear of litigation? Need for a juicy Whistleblower post? None of the above. The patient was hospitalized after a week of abdominal cramps, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. A CAT scan of the abdomen, often ordered by reflex in the emergency department (ED), showed no abnormal findings. In the ED, her white blood count was modestly elevated, but had normalized by the following morning when I met her. My physical examination demonstrated no concerning findings. I suspected that she was suffering from gastroenteritis, medical jargon for‘stomach flu’. Ph...

WELCOME TO MAMMOGATE! This week, the revised U.S Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) mammography guidelines monopolized newsprint and airtime. Was this truly Page 1 news? For a few days, mammojournalism pushed aside stories on the war in Afghanistan, double digit unemployment, Iran’s hidden nukes, the president’s foreign nation tour and the war on terror. (Note to readers: The phrase ‘war on terror’ is now verboten in the the Obama administration. No spokesmen will utter it, except on deep backround. I unabashedly use it since it seems that our enemies are still at war with us.) Of course, it’s not the science of mammography that is white hot – it’s the politics of breast cancer that is volatile and combustible. Medical guidelines in every specialty are revised regularly, yet no conflagration erupts in the public square, as occurred last week. When my own specialty revises colonoscopy guidelines every few years, the public and the medical community respond with a collective yawn. N...

I have already opined on the ‘ never events’ reform where hospitals would not be compensated for certain medical catastrophes that should never occur. We all agree that performing surgery on the wrong organ, or the wrong patient, should never happen. My fear is that the list of events will metastasize and will include many unfortunate medical outcomes that cannot be avoided by even the most diligent physicians and institutions, a point echoed at The Covert Rationing Blog, and elsewhere. Dr. Val, in a guest post at Health Care Law Blog argues that patient falls in the hospital, while regrettable, should not be a 'never event'. Dr. Wes , a cardiologist, irreverently suggests that the common cold may be added to the 'never events' list! We bloggers know how easy it is to hurl opinions from our safe sanctuaries. I learned this when I wrote a post about excessive emergency room care. Folks who had never heard of me, an obscure gastroenterologist from Cleveland, were leav...

The law has many privileges and protections for its own players that are necessary for the legal process to operate effectively. For example, we all accept that a judge should have absolute legal immunity for decisions and judgments made in his judicial capacity. If a judge could be sued because he ruled that certain evidence was inadmissible, for example, then the system would collapse. Immunity allows judges to decide legal issues freely, without any threat that he could be legally vulnerable. This is how it should be. Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments that challenge legal immunity for prosecutors, under certain circumstances. As an aside, I learned an astonishing fact in the New York Times article that reported that … prosecutors cannot be sued for anything they do during trial, including knowingly submitting false evidence . Read this sentence again. I had to as I was sure I had misread it initially. Immunity for trial conduct was not the issue bein...

St. Anthony plagued by demons. 15th century work. I read a thoughtful post at See First entitled, What Really Matters. The blog’s name, See First, is taken from a quote from Sir William Osler, one of medicine’s greatest luminaries who emphasized the importance of learning medicine at the beside. The post is a plea for physicians to strive to achieve caring and compassionate bedside manners. It emphasizes the importance of attentiveness, communication and empathy with patients. Though it is not stated, the author clearly understands that the doctor-patient relationship is the essential element of the healing art. While every physician knows this, we still need to be reminded of this truth, from time to time. I commented on his blog that the piece was spot on. I agree unreservedly that patients deserve compassion and caring from their physicians. They deserve appointments without bleating pagers and phone calls. They deserve eye contact. They deserve an opportunity to say 3 or 4 sentenc...

In my 20 years of medical practice, no issue provokes more physician angst than the unfair medical malpractice situation we physicians endure. It is the wound that will not heal. Physicians pursue one primary strategy to protect ourselves at the expense of our patients and society; we practice defensive medicine. Defensive medicine is omnipresent and burns up billions of health care dollars that we need so desperately. Defensive medicine, I strongly believe, is practiced by nearly every physician in the country. If you suspect that this is hyperbole, ask your own doctor, although you may find him defensive about the subject. It’s not actual lawsuits that are suffocating doctors; it’s the fear of of being sued. The aura of litigation hovers in your doctor’s office during your office visits. It's like carbon monoxide. You can't see it or smell it. But, it is real and it is potent. Attorneys and others reject our defensive posture. They argue that we should simply perform tests ...

Which doctors practice defensive medicine? Only those who are breathing. The president, however, wasn’t convinced of this reality when he spoke to the nation on September 9th at a joint session of Congress. “I don’t believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet, but I have talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs.” May be contributing? Mr. President, if I may , in the gray and nebulous world of medicine, one truth is certain; defensive medicine cost billions of health care dollars every year. Physicians hold this truth to be self evident. One month after the president’s speech, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report that reversed it’s own prior conclusions on the value of tort reform. It now states that tort reform could reduce “the use of diagnostic tests and other health care services when providers recommend those services principally to reduce their potential exposure to lawsuits.” The report als...