Great Blog (sent by a friend of mine)

Here's the link;  Bioethics Discussion Blog: Patient Modesty: Volume 56  There are some interesting conversations about medical things other than patient modesty.  Little things like that pesky "informed consent" problem.  Things like hospital acquired infections, just a wide range of issues that make for good reading.  I highly encourage people to peruse it.

I Like This Guy

As I wind my way through the internet I occasionally find a kindred spirit.  Here's a guy who "likes" advanced practice nurses as much as I've grown to like them.  (not)  Here are some scathing comments from him.

Jason Simpson • 21 days ago

"Shifting to a team-based model will only increase costs.
For the same episode of care, we are now paying for a physician, an NP, a PA, a social worker, a pharmacist and a copule of other ancillary people when in the past we would have paid only an MD.
Why are we paying 5 people for the work of 1? Costs will skyrocket as everybody bills insurance for the same patient encounter."

I've said the same thing.
 
"When my son needed anesthesia for a tonsillectomy, a person pretending to be a doctor wearing a white coat walked into the room and said "hello I'm Jackie and I'll be your anesthesiologist today." (emphasis mine)

I knew she was lying because her name tag clearly read "Jackie Jones, CRNA" on it.

I called her out on her lies and said that in no way would that lying piece of trash be near my son during the surgery. The surgeon came in, I explained what the charlatan tried to do, and he promptly called the department chairman of the anesthesiology department to come down and handle the anesthesia personally.

I refuse to ever let a watered down nurse play doctor with myself or my kids." (Now where have we heard that sentiment before?  Oh yeah, here on this blog.)

Ditto.
 "My experience: MDs > PAs > NPs

NPs are lazy 9-5 employees who clock out and go home at the end of their shift. They dont contribute anything to medical research or advance the profession. Their idea of "scholarship" is to write a study about the stresses/pressures of home care givers or some other soft social research BS that provides no real value.

Like I said above, there are certainly many lousy MDs out there too, but at least I've found a good number who are smart, hard-working, and actually contribute meaningful information and research to healthcare.

NPs are grocery store clerks sent by their bosses to collect the bill.  (I love this!  Emphasis mine)

I've also had many more misdiagnoses by NPs than MDs. One NP told me that my son should take liquid albuterol instead of inhaled albuterol for his asthma! LOL I've seen a few misdiagnoses by doctors too, but the NP mistakes greatly outnumber them."

ROFL!  I just had this conversation with a nurse in regards to grocery personnel.  A psycho nurse said that we should all be bagging groceries as we are his INFERIORS.  Here Jason puts the correct spin on it. 

"Restrained By Versed"

Here's a sad story about a doctor's regret about a patient of his.  Look at the first statement from here;  I failed to appease pain during her life, so she died terribly 

(excerpt) "Ellen died a clockwork machine, restrained by Versed, fed by nasal tube, secretions in bags, and as her blood pressure dropped intravenous pressors accelerated in dose until blood squeezed from her extremities left fingertips dry and black as coal."

"Restrained by Versed" this poor lady had to deal with all this while unable to stop them or request more pain meds.  She was doomed to waiting, conscious of everything, for death to take her out of the torture chamber she found herself in.  I sure hope I die of something catastrophic so that the medical field can't do this to me. 

Using Versed as a chemical restraint isn't something that most medical people will admit to.  However it seems that this is EXACTLY why they use it as shown by this doctor.  Remember why this is called CONSCIOUS sedation.  You are CONSCIOUS but not necessarily "sedated".  Your muscles are flaccid, but your brain still has the same brain waves as unmedicated people.  There is no way to tell what the drug is doing to a person's psyche, and most medical workers don't care.  Can you imagine a worse nightmare?

Thanks to Dr. Salwitz for recognising this barbarism.

More Proof

Yet another article on what "anesthesia" (to include sedation) does to people.  I wanted regional anesthetic along with pain medication.  This is the BEST way to do surgery on an extremity in particular.  Why in the world are we being subjected to brain destruction for no reason?

How a general anaesthetic could harm your memory for life: Research finds that three quarters of older patients develop memory loss after surgery | Mail Online

Nurse Rogers aka Last Call Killer

Here's a story about a nurse that got caught. 

Richard W. Rogers, aka Last Call Killer, is sentenced to life — Last Call Killer — Crime Library on truTV.com

Here's another one:

Richard Rogers | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers  In this one I want to draw your attention to the drug used to gain compliance so that this nurse, employed at a very prestigious hospital, Mt. Sinai, could kill them more easily.  Or did he just inject them with our (ahem) favorite drug and dismember them alive?  OMG can you imagine?  Here's the excerpt;  "On May 28, 2001, Mr. Rogers was arrested at Mount Sinai Hospital. When investigators searched his home at 62 Bridge Court on Staten Island, they found a bottle of Versed, a sedative that can be used as a date-rape drug, (emphasis mine) rug fibers consistent with those found with Mr. Mulcahy's body, and "several photographs of unknown men on which stab wounds had been drawn," according to court documents."  Versed should be banned.

This same nurse got away with murder by claiming self defense while he was still in nursing school.  How does it happen that nurses with a violent past get hired in the first place?  He killed somebody with a HAMMER for heaven's sake!  WTH?  Wouldn't that be a red flag or (ominously) do nurses not have to have a "background check" like truck drivers have for hauling hazardous materials? 

Want More Proof Of Medical Malpractice?

Here's a quote from www.nurse-anesthesia.org that a friend of mine gleaned.
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"That's just it. It was a surgical procedure and I was doing the IV sedation with Versed and Fentanyl. I said to the doctor we do not have a signed consent. While I was filling it out he inserted the biopsy needle into the patients abdomen!! He never said one word to the patient, he didn't even introduce himself. When we were taking the patient back to ICU she complained bitterly, and rightfully so, that the doctor had not said a word to her and that she didn't even know his name. In his notes he goes into detail about how he explained the procedure, risks, etc and provided the patient an opportunity to ask questions, and that he then had the patient sign the consent. This doctor is getting off scot free without even a slap on his wrist.

I was so stunned by what he had done. I felt caught between a rock and a hard place. Here's this young person with a needle in their liver. No permit. I truly did not know what to do. Stop? Make him remove it? Get the patient alert and explain to them what the doctor had done and then ask them to sign the consent? Knowing that the patient had verbally acknowledged that they knew what was going to occur and they were doing fine, the procedure would be done in a matter of minutes. It all happened so fast.

Working in radiology the management does not understand the implications of what this doctor did by performing the procedure without a consent while knowing what he should have done and by lying in his charting that he had done what he what he didn't do. I think that is very serious. They don't see it that way."

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My surgeon said the same things about how "he explained the procedure, risks, etc and provided the patient an opportunity to ask questions, and that he then had the patient sign the consent."  (you can see his remarks in my medical records)  My doctor "got off scot free without even a slap on his wrist" as well.  As far as *I* know my doctor never was at the hospital in the first place, let alone there prior to surgery.

 

My take on this is that the management DOES understand the implications of the behavior and CHOOSES to ignore it because there is almost never a successful malpractice suit that can be brought.  They don't care!  Besides which there is money to be made by doing things to patients without their consent.  They are all so protected that they don't even bother with silly things like informed consent.  What's to stop them?  (not a rhetorical question, I'm serious, WHAT'S TO STOP THEM?)

 

The doc in this story probably felt that the patient was already under the influence of Versed and so he could dispense will all niceties like informed consent or identifying himself.  Versed is SUCH a bad drug and it's not just bad for the patient, it's bad for medical practitioners as well and leads to this kind of anti-social arrogance. 

 

Medical Malpractice: A Patient's Story

A friend of mine sent me this article;  You Can’t Handle The Truth | Medical Malpractice: A Patient's Story  This is a harrowing tale, and until I had my own debacle I would have found it hard to believe that medical people were this hardened and callous, not to mention INCOMPETENT!.  If I hadn't received so much hate mail from nurses, especially advanced practice nurses, I would have thought that what happened to this lady was an isolated incident.  How many times does this go on each and every day while the perpetrators whine and moan about "tort reform" to give them blanket immunity from their behavior?