MD Whistleblower

From time to time, friends, patients and relatives ask my advice on participating in a medical experiment.  My response has been no.  More accurately, once I explain to them the realities of research, they don’t need to be persuaded.  They back away. Here’s the key point.   When an individual volunteers to join a research project, the medical study is not designed to benefit the individual patient.  This point is sorely misunderstood by patients and their families who understandably will pursue any opportunity to achieve some measure of healing for an ailing individual.  I get this.  In addition, I believe that these research proposals are often slanted in a way to suggest that there may direct benefit that the patient will receive.  I am not accusing the medical establishment of uttering outright falsehoods to prospective study patients, but there are two powerful forces that may incentivize investigators to recruit patients with undue ...

Promoting medical marijuana use is hot – smokin’ hot.  States are racing to legalize this product, both for recreational and medical use.  In my view, there’s a stronger case to be made for the former than the latter.  Presently, marijuana is a Schedule I drug, along with heroin, LSD and Ecstasy.  The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines this category as drugs with no acceptable medical use and a high potential risk of addiction.  Schedule I contains drugs that the FDA deems to be the least useful and most dangerous.  Schedule V includes cough medicine containing codeine. On its face, it is absurd that marijuana and heroin are Schedule I soulmates.  I expect that the FDA will demote marijuana to a more benign category where it belongs.  It will certainly have to if marijuana is going to be approved as a medicine.  There is no question that some advocates favoring medicalization of marijuana were using this as a more palatab...

Why are the costs of prescription drugs so high?  While I have prescribed thousands of them, I can’t offer an intelligent answer to this inquiry.  Of course, all the players in this game – the pharmaceutical companies, Pharmacy Benefit Managers, insurance companies, consumer activists and the government- offer their respective bromides, where does the truth lie?  While I don’t fully understand it, and I don’t know how to fix it, we all know that the system is broken.  More than ever before in my career, I am seeing patients who cannot afford the medicines I prescribe for them.  In the last few weeks of this writing, 3 patients with colitis, a condition where the large bowel is inflamed, called me to complain about the cost of their new medicine.  The annual cost was in the $2,500 - $3,000 range, which is way out of range for normal folks.  While I was only focused on the colitis drug, many of these patients face prohibitive costs over multiple med...

For me, the test of fairness, which many of us fail, is if we would have the same view of events if the situation were reversed.  An employee approaches his boss requesting a raise, pointing out that he has not had a raise in 2 years, while other colleagues have received pay increases.  The boss responds that while his performance was highly satisfactory, the colleagues who did receive pay raises demonstrated sterling reviews.  The employee believes this decision is unfair, and suggests there may have been some favoritism at play.   The fairness test here is what would the employee do if he were the manager. A nursing supervisor is told that two nurses on a hospital ward are unable to report to their shift.  Each nurse has to carry a heavier patient load for that shift.  These nurses believe that they are entitled to additional compensation as their already heavy work load has been increased.  This request is denied by the hospital’s a...

Free speech is one of our bedrock constitutional rights.  The debate and battle of what constitutes lawful free speech is ongoing.  The issue is more complex than I can grasp with legal distinctions separating political speech, commercial speech and non-commercial speech.  And, of course the right of speech does not permit the free expression of obscenity or ‘fighting words’, along with some other exclusions.  And, there is no right to free speech in a private work place, where an employee can be fired for speaking his or her mind.  While worker in a private shop may claim that he had a right to call his boss a flippin’ jerk, he would likely find that he suddenly has an abundance of free time to contemplate his prior utterance. Leaving aside the First Amendment, physicians have always enjoyed free speech in our offices.  We ask our patients questions of the most private and intimate nature.  And, they answer us.  We ask such questions because...

Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court of the United States, will face a contentious vetting process in the U.S. Senate.  I expect the sausage-making process to be an opportunity for political grandstanding where bombastic bloviators will spew forth partisan pabulum.  Look for a senator, for example, to point out that the judge did not clean up after his dog when he was in the 7 th grade.  “If we can’t trust you to clean up after Sparky, then how can we trust you to mind the Constitution?” We read and hear about the scourge of judicial activism (JA), where judges invent laws rather than interpret existing law, as they are charged to do.  The antidote to judicial activism is judicial restraint (JR), when judges exercise modesty and base their rulings on the intent of the framers or on the words in the statute.  If, for example, the statute does not specify that “the puppies shall be saved”, then it is not fo...

Here’s a quote that readers will not readily recognize. It is a pity that a doctor is precluded by his profession from being able sometimes to say what he really thinks. I’ll share the origin of the quote at the post’s conclusion.  How’s that for a teaser?  I'll give you a hint below. Author of the Quote as a Young Child Physicians by training and experience are guarded with our words.  To begin, we are never entirely sure of anything, and we should make sure that we do not convey certainty when none exists.  This is why physicians rarely use phrases such as, I’m positive that..., I’m 100% sure…, there are no side-effects… Because of the uncertainties of the medical universe, sometimes we sanitize our own concerns when we are advising patients and their families.  We may see an individual in the office with unexplained weight loss and a change in her bowel pattern.  While we may fear that a malignancy is lurking, we would be wise to ...