It is known hat Doctors resort to unethical practices.
I have posted how a Doctor forced a patient to undergo operations to complete the target and the patient turning up Dead!
Under Health, I have also listed various unethical practices by the Doctors , Hospitals.
ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.
Following is an excerpt from their investigations.
The next time your doctor prescribes a medicine, recall this and check if the medicine is really needed and will help you.
Drug Companies Paid Doctors.
“When Dollars for Docs first launched in 2010, ProPublica spoke with several of the dozens of doctors who had earned more than $200,000 from their speaking and consulting work for drug companies. Now, with records from more companies and more years of data, we’ve identified 22 doctors who’ve earned at least $500,000 since 2009 — including one, Jon Draud, who was paid more than $1 million.”
The totals listed here cover different time periods and spending categeories, and aren’t directly comparable. See notes below. See what each company discloses »
I have been critical of some Doctors who have become crass after money and for unethical practices like accepting gifts from Pharma Companies, forcing patients to take unnecessary medicines.
A Doctor in Uk forced operation on a patient to meet his ‘Target!’
He met his Target but the patient died.
There is another case where a Doctor forced three operations on a patient, patient died.
Corporates mean profit, Profit means Sales ‘Targets”
This evil can be eradicated only by patients going to Doctors who thorough checks you up physically,does not prescribe a battery of Tests , who listens to your problem , most importantly does not work in a Corporate run Hospital, and who does not have a Fancy Title or Degree.
Story:
Ray Law pictured in Lincoln with his wife Kathleen Photo: Steve Hill
Ray Law, 60, died of complications two days after his prostate cancer operation at Lincoln County Hospital in February 2010.
On the day he died, a senior doctor raised serious concerns about the incident in an internal memo, saying the targets were putting patients at risk and putting “enormous and unsustainable pressure” on surgeons.
Mr Law should have been put on a high-dependency ward, according to the memo sent to hospital managers, but he ended up on a general ward due to “increasing pressures”. Despite these concerns being raised, Mr Law’s widow Kathleen was never told about them.
On Thursday night, Mrs Law told The Daily Telegraph of her “anger” at being kept in the dark and said: “I want answers.”
Her daughter Nikki Law, 35, said: “It’s absolutely despicable. I have no trust in the NHS whatsoever. We’ll definitely take legal action…
He signed a £500,000 confidentiality deal preventing him from speaking out over patient safety worries at the hospital shortly before Mr Law’s death.
On Thursday Mr Walker broke the terms of the order to claim he had come under “dangerous” pressure from NHS officials to prioritise target-hitting over emergency care. He refused to do so and was sacked. The memo, which did not identify Mr Law by name, said targets were exerting “enormous pressure” resulting in “ad hoc arrangements for surgery at short notice”. It noted: “This is not only prejudicial to ongoing patient care, but present enormous and unsustainable pressure on the operating surgeons.”
The memo said normally only “one or two” radical prostatectomies would be performed by a surgeon in a day, but that “the additional case [of Mr Law] was required due to [redacted] target pressures”.
A patient being treated at an under-fire hospital trust died after a surgeon had to carry out three “radical procedures” on the same day due to “target pressures”, a leaked letter from a doctor has claimed.
Source :Telegraph)
The surveyed doctors said they prescribed them to induce a “placebo effect,” to reassure patients or because patients pushed for a treatment.
“For authorities to put their heads in the sand and pretend (placebo treatments) are not being given out is not helpful,” said Jeremy Howick of Oxford University, one of the authors of the study, which was published online Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. “We need to think of ways to maximize the benefits of using placebos,” he said.
Howick and colleagues used a Web-based survey and got 783 responses. The sample was drawn from a list that included 71 percent of all doctors registered with the General Medical Council, the governing body for doctors in the U.K.
The survey asked doctors if they had ever used a true placebo, like a sugar pill or another kind of dummy treatment such as a drug not meant for the patient’s condition or a non-essential examination including blood tests and X-rays. Nearly all of the doctors — 97 percent — reported having used some kind of placebo treatment at least once, while 12 percent reported having used a fake pill.
I posted a blog yesterday defending Doctors in a case where the Doctor was accused of negligence when a boy died of Anesthesia overdose during Cosmetic Surgery in Bangalore,India.
It is not that I am always on the side of Doctors.
Useless Medicines prescribed.
I have posted a couple of blogs on Doctor’ unethical practices including administering useless medicine to patients.
Now Doctors, in a study conducted on Doctors selected at random, for medical practice, have admitted to giving useless medicine like
like low-dose drugs, vitamins, nutritional supplements or an unnecessary exam.
Story:
The surveyed doctors said they prescribed them to induce a “placebo effect,” to reassure patients or because patients pushed for a treatment.
“For authorities to put their heads in the sand and pretend (placebo treatments) are not being given out is not helpful,” said Jeremy Howick of Oxford University, one of the authors of the study, which was published online Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. “We need to think of ways to maximize the benefits of using placebos,” he said.
Howick and colleagues used a Web-based survey and got 783 responses. The sample was drawn from a list that included 71 percent of all doctors registered with the General Medical Council, the governing body for doctors in the U.K.
The survey asked doctors if they had ever used a true placebo, like a sugar pill or another kind of dummy treatment such as a drug not meant for the patient’s condition or a non-essential examination including blood tests and X-rays. Nearly all of the doctors — 97 percent — reported having used some kind of placebo treatment at least once, while 12 percent reported having used a fake pill.
About 77 percent of doctors said they used some kind of placebo treatment every week; more than 80 percent of them said their use in some circumstances was ethical.
The “placebo effect” treatments included unnecessary physical exams, joint injections, physical therapy, peppermint pills for a sore throat and antibiotics for infections where they would not be effective.
Dr. Tony Calland, chairman of the British Medical Association’s Ethics Committee, said he was disappointed by the findings. “Prescribing something that you know is of no value is not ethical,” he said.
A previous study found about half of U.S. doctors regularly give their patients treatments that probably won’t work without telling them, and the practice has been reported elsewhere, including Canada, Denmark and Switzerland. The American Medical Association says physicians may only use placebos if the patient is aware.
In 2011, the German Medical Association recommended doctors use fake pills and other placebo treatments more often and said patients didn’t necessarily need to be told.
Some small studies have found dummy pills work even when patients are explicitly told what they’re getting and others have documented the fake treatments can spark a biological effect in the body.
“For illnesses where there is no truly effective treatment, a placebo or alternative therapy is a fine thing to do,” said Dr. Walter Brown, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of a recent book on placebos. He was not connected to the new study”
Same test is repeated for the same patient in a gap of a day!
Useless Drugs, and at times Procedures .
Physicians recommend against many procedures patients have come to expect, including imaging for low back pain (unless it has lasted more than six weeks) and any cardiac screening, including EKGs, in patients without heart symptoms.
The widely used “DEXA” X-ray screening for osteoporosis landed in rheumatologists’ crosshairs. It should not be done more than once every two years, they advise, because changes in bone density over shorter periods are typically less than the machines’ measurement error, which can cause women to think they’re losing bone mass when they’re not.(life,national post)
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If you’re having surgery, you may wonder if you need an imaging test of your heart to make sure it is safe for you to have the surgery. But if you are not having heart surgery—and you haven’t had a stroke and don’t have a severe heart condition, diabetes, or kidney disease—the imaging tests usually aren’t helpful. Here’s why:
The tests usually aren’t necessary before low-risk surgery.
Some imaging tests use sound waves to take pictures of the heart. This is called echocardiography. Other tests use a small amount of radioactive material. These can be called either a nuclear or CT scan.
Doing a heart imaging test can show whether you’re at risk of having a heart attack or another serious complication when you have surgery. The test results may lead to special care during or after surgery, delaying surgery until the problem is treated, or changing the kind of surgery.
But the risk of heart complications from minor surgeries, such as a breast biopsy, eye or skin surgery, or any “same-day” surgery, is very low. There really isn’t anything doctors can do to lower the risk further. In other words, heart-imaging tests are not likely to change anything. In fact, even major surgery is safe for most healthy people who feel well and are physically active.
Unless you have heart disease or other risk factors, usually all you need before surgery is a careful medical history and physical exam.
Heart imaging tests can pose risks.
The tests are usually very safe, and some can be done with little or no radiation. But if your risk of having a heart problem is low, the tests can produce a false-positive result that could cause anxiety and lead to more tests and an unneeded delay of surgery.
For example, you might have a follow-up coronary angiography (cardiac catheterization). During this test, a catheter is inserted into the heart through a vein, dye is injected, and x-rays are taken. The risks are low, but exposure to radiation adds up over your lifetime, so it’s best to avoid x-rays whenever you can.
Imaging tests can cost a lot.
An imaging stress test costs between $500 and $2,000, and a cardiac CT scan costs $500 to $600. If abnormal results lead to coronary angiography, that can add about $5,000 to the cost. So the tests should only be used when the results would change the way your surgery is done.
Check this site for more before you take any decision on Tests for you and discuss with your Doctor.
That most of the Doctors are after money to recover their cost of Education.
But this one takes the cake!
Workin’ Overtime (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Story:
A doctor in regional NSW has been paid almost $700,000 in overtime during a two-year period to cover the roster of a public hospital.
It has been revealed the doctor has been paid as much as $39,598 in one month to work extra hours and stay on-call in addition to normal hours, a practice being condemned by the Australian Medical Association.
The Sun-Herald has obtained documents under freedom of information laws that revealed the doctor had earned $333,073 in overtime in the 2010-11 financial year and the same doctor earned $348,686 in overtime the previous year on top of the salary earned for working in the unnamed public hospital.
The doctor is described as a career medical officer, a position which on average earns about $150,000 a year for a 38-hour week. NSW Health has refused to identify the hospital or the local health district involved.
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But the large overtime amounts caught the attention of the NSW Auditor-General, Peter Achterstraat, who has reported to State Parliament that it was the highest amount paid to a single employee in NSW Health.
Internal NSW Health documents obtained by The Sun-Herald showed contradictory explanations for the excessive amounts of overtime.
In one internal report prepared after Mr Achterstraat queried the payment, NSW Health said the overtime was worked by a full-time career medical officer who had good clinical skills and ”works agreed shifts to minimise the use of locums per agreement with the hospital’s medical director”.
However, another NSW Health email stated: ”Although it would have been cheaper to use locums more often that [sic] pay this overtime, the need for experienced local knowledge and reliability was a key.”
