Tag Archives: medical

Therapeutic Nihilism

The HIV/AIDS epidemic caused fear and panic in the 1980s. Yet physicians stepped up, set new protocols, and continued to treat patients without requiring HIV tests before seeing them At the time this disease was 100% fatal and they did not fully know how it was transmitted. Today, COVID-19 if you are under 60 the crude mortality rate is less than .4% and if you are under 30 this rate is less that .2%. Yet even with known precautions, patients with severe NON-COVID disease are being put off, sent to the ER or ignored. It’s an embarrassment to the medical community. Most of the heroes of the HIV era are gone, replaced by physicians that would rather cower behind overblown fear than take care of their patients.

A part of the modern hippocratic oath as taken by physicians today says:

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

John Smith, (not his real name) waited weeks for an appointment to meet with the orthopedic surgeon to remove infected bone from his hip. He had already been diagnosed with osteomyelitis (an infection in the bone) in his hip. After waiting two weeks as his infection raged in his hip he developed a fever but was finally able to come to Birmingham for his appointment and leg and life saving surgery. Upon arriving at his doctor’s office they took his temperature. Then sent him away.

From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9gO6sCzcnc

It does not take much intelligence to figure out why he had a fever. Instead the doctor puts his patient at risk by refusing to see him. He will now have to go through an emergency room and will likely lose his leg or his life.

Another friend of mine, call her Jill, has been diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia. She has tested negative for COVID. The pneumonia is getting slowly worse. Her doctor refused to see her for two weeks. This too will most likely result in an ER visit at the point her life is in danger.

Where are the physicians, those heroes that took the Hippocratic Oath, the one’s who swore to do something to help the sick and injured, who swore not to do nothing. Yet, doctor after doctor is letting their patients get sicker and sicker, even die rather than take the chance a patient might be infected with COVID. Even when they know their patient does not have COVID from testing, they are turning them away, or delaying seeing them.

This used to mean something.

I have been unable to see my cardiologist for 3 months past when they told me I needed to be checked. If I had a problem, they would let me go to the ER or have a heart attack before I was treated. No heroes there, and I have tested COVID negative.

These few examples are being repeated millions of times across the country. Yet physicians have gone along with this approach to healthcare, intentionally putting their patients at risk rather than seeing any patient that might carry the disease. The patient and the doctor can wear masks and limit the time of exposure yet fear rules these former heroes.

Since when was being a physician supposed to be risk free? Each one signs on to treat sick people. Healthy people have no need for doctors. With the advent of COVID, they are violating, en mass their commitment to patients. Is this why they are so highly paid, so they can cower behind policies that keep patients away. It’s like a roofer that won’t go up high because he might fall. But the roofer is at much greater risk and has far more fortitude than those that are not caring for their patients.

From: https://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-real-estate-hiring-a-roofer-story.html

No one is measuring the deaths that could have been prevented with normal care. So if a patient waiting to see his physician gets COVID he or she is more likely to die or to be sicker than if they had been treated properly.

We should call it the hypocritical oath instead. These former heroes took an oath they refuse to uphold. It is a shameful response to a virus that seldom kills anyone without underlying disease. If they had not taken such an oath I would not hold these physicians responsible, but they did take the oath. History is full of physicians that took much greater risks in order to treat infectious patients. Yet, even knowing a patient does not have COVID many of these doctors are still not seeing their patients or are delaying treatment.

No wonder our ERs are full, everyone with an issue, or fever, or cough is being sent to the ER, even if the cause is known. This exposes these patients to COVID when it is completely unnecessary. Even if they did not have COVID, by the time they leave the hospital or ER, they will have it. Where are the doctors that took the Hippocratic oath? Why don’t they speak up against this crime against their patients? This approach to personal safety is putting every patient at risk. It is killing many of them.

Scarier than COVID-19: No Freedom

FOOD BANKS ARE OVERRUN

The United States is a country with a history of overcoming huge problems when the people are left to be inventive, innovative, and free.  We have forgotten that basic fact, to our great detriment.

In the name of health and security the government has denied millions their right to feed their families.   In Texas,  Shelly Luther was jailed for opening up her beauty shop.  In Birmingham you can be fined for not wearing a mask. The Episcopal Dioceses of Kansas says Churches must keep a register of names of people attending in-person services for possible future contact tracing.  Why is that?  Are Christians to be tracked?  Across the country meetings of more than 10 people are banned. Tech companies are filtering and removing information with which they don’t agree,  preventing people’s voices from getting out and hindering even scientific exploration.

The response to COVID-19 is not protecting the most vulnerable, just damaging everyone else.  In New York 66% of the new cases have come from people sheltering in place, yet “Non-Essential workers” can not go to work.    Studies have show that the number of people infected but who never were sick enough to seek treatment is far higher (20%)in New York City than imagined.  The virus has been here and the shelter in place orders may have flattened the peak and kept the hospitals from being overwhelmed, but at this point all these orders are are draconian steps demonstrating the arbitrary execution of power by government.  There is no science to it. 

The government has arbitrarily decided who is “Essential”.  It is not just healthcare workers, delivery drivers,  grocery workers.  Every person who has to feed a family is essential to that family.  Every business with customers is essential to those customers. Daycare is essential to working parents.   To a near sighted person eye doctors are essential, to the sick the availability of emergency rooms is essential even if they do not have COVID-19.

go away

Instead we have run patients with milder problems away from our medical facilities, so when they do return, those problems will be severe.  We have cut off those who are sick from any disease from their loved ones and advocates.  Patients that could not speak for themselves now have no one to speak for them.

What makes sense, is that instead of locking up everyone, denying even the most basic rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to assemble, and the freedom to worship, is that we protect the people that are most vulnerable.  Clearly the elderly, those in nursing homes or those who have significant co-morbidities are most at risk.  The vast majority of everyone else is at minor risk of serious infection.

Those at risk need personal protective gear or need to limit their exposure to others who have known COVID-19 statuses.  In New York City 20% of the people tested for antibodies showed exposure.  That is millions. They have already been exposed, had the disease, mostly without symptoms and so have no need to shelter.  They do not need to be protected.

We have let the media scare us into terrible and horribly destructive policy decisions.  These decisions have failed to protect the most vulnerable while scaring everyone into giving up their inalienable rights.  The media have tried to scare us at every turn, they have dismissed the proven effectiveness of Hydroxy-Chloro-quinine although the drug has been around for 50+ years.  They have helped fuel bad decisions at every turn.  Much of the media took China’s propaganda and repeated it slowing recognition of the true threat from this virus.

Google has said they will only allow posts that agree with World Health Organization guidelines.  This is the same WHO that told us that the virus was not human to human transmittable, and who’s ties to China are more than questionable.   Science is about putting all ideas out there for evaluation, not just those approved by the communist party of China.

There are a whole host of players to blame for the destruction of our economy and the loss of freedom that has resulted.  Now is the time to reverse those errors.  Look at the science, the true numbers, as some of the media have inflated the deaths to sow fear. Look at Sweden as they did not shut down and fared better than us.  Stop state and city oligarchs from exercising petty rules designed to show their power. Be smart about protecting the vulnerable and fully open up the country.

Not opening up the country will extend the depression that is already upon us. If you care for this country for the well being of your family, now is the time to step up and demand the freedoms guaranteed by our constitution.

 

 

 

 

Our Veterans Deserve Better — Here is the Fix

There are lists of over 1000 veterans waiting for their first appointment at bunches of VA hospitals.  How that happens baffles me.  The fix is simple, Hire 10 doctors seeing 3 patients an hour for 8 hours a day.  (Any doctor in private practice will tell you that they often see 8 to 10 patients an hour, so 3 is peanuts.)  Each doctor would see 24 patients a day so that is 240 patients per day for the 10 doctors.  In a week they have seen 1200 patients and in two weeks the backlog is gone.  Keep the 10 doctors and support staff to take care of the follow up and in two months you have either treated and released, admitted, tested, or set up ongoing therapy for 2400 patients all who were initially seen and evaluated within two weeks.

In order to enroll, document and plan for the influx you will no doubt need to hire 5 nurses, and 5 front desk folks, schedule labs, hospital admissions, equipment purchases,  plan for in-house lab tests and outsourced lab tests, plan for reviews of those tests and arrange for treatment protocols with follow up.  Any competent medical office manager could do this blindfolded while having a stroke.

The fact that this was not done in all these facilities is a total mystery.  It’s simple resource allocation.  Competent people do it in every business and healthcare organization in the country every day.