September 6, 2017
Source: Shidonna Raven Garden & Cook. All Rights Reserved. Copyright. Please contact us for republishing permission and citation formatting.
Source: John Hopkins Medicine
Photo Source: Unsplash, Klara Kulikova
The medical industry makes many baseless claims to cloak their predatory tactics, such as the opioid crisis. Few of their predatory behaviors are a result or initiated by the patient and malpractice along with lawsuits, such as in the case of Purdue and opioids are often the consequences of such behaviors along with FDA fines. Such tactics might look like:
Mis-billing for services not needed or nor rendered at all
Over-billing for services not needed or not rendered at all
Billing for fake patients or deceased patients
Any activities outside the medical facility
Unauthorized disclosure of medical records
HIPPA violations
Incomplete medical records
Treatments who's root causes are unknown and thus can not be treated
Disease or diagnosis with no proof or evidence of existence
The medication and treatment of everyday human experiences or conditions
The lack of informed consent full disclosure
Mercury explanations and tentative cures
Medications and treatments that lack efficacy or have been pulled from the market
Hospital monopolies
High morbidity rates
High mortality rates
High health insurance rates
Consistently receives fines, malpractice or other lawsuits
Use of medications or treatments for new and different diseases or diagnosis
Can you think of any examples?
Excerpt from "Psychiatry, the Science of Lies" by Thomas Szasz. Preface ix-x.
[In the science of politics,] it is inconceivable that telling the truth can ever become more profitable than telling lies. - Antoine-Augustin Cournot (1801-1877), quotes in Syphilis, puritanism and Witch Hunt: Historical Explanation in the Light of Medicine and Pyschoanalysis with a Forecast about AIDS, by S. Anreski.
The widespread belief that the scientist's job is to reveal the secrets of nature is erroneous. Nature has no secrets; only persons do.
Secrecy implies agency, absent in nature, "Nature" observed Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), "admits no lie." Nature neither lies nor tells the truth. It has no secrets" "secrets" is the name we give to our ignorance of its working. Because nature is not an agent, many of its working can be understood by observation, reasoning experiment, measurement, calculation, and truth-telling, the basic methods of science. Deception and divination are powerless to advance our understanding of natural phenomena; indeed they preempt and prevent such understanding.
The human "sciences" are not merely unlike the physical sciences; they are in many ways, opposites. Whereas nature neither lies not tells the truth, persons habitually do both. This is why deception is useful tool for persons such as detectives whose job is to ferret out other people's secrets; why deception is a useful tool also for so-called experts-such as psychiatrist, psychologists, and politicians-whose ostensible job is to explain and predict certain human behaviors, especially behaviors some people consider dangerous or undesirable; and why such experts habitually deceive others and themselves.
The integrity of the natural scientific enterprise depends on truth-seeking and truth-speaking by individuals engaged in activities we call "scientific" an don the scientific community's commitment to expose and reject erroneous explanation and false "facts." In contrast, the stability of religious and the ersatz faiths of psychiatry and the so-called behavioral sciences depends on the loyalty of its practitioners to established doctrines and institutions and the rejection of truth-telling as injurious to the welfare of the group that rest on it. Revealingly, we call revelations of the "secrets" of nature "discoveries" but call revelations of the secrets of powerful persons and institutions "exposes."
Psychiatry-a term I use here to include psychoanalysis, psychology, and all the so-called mental health professions-is one the most important institution of modern societies. The institution rests squarely on the postulate-proposition that "mental illness is an illness like any other illness." That proposition is a lie. This lie is what makes malingering-the faking of disease-the great secret of psychiatry: a popular understanding that faking illness is a form of deception (and often self-deception) would destroy psychiatry. In this book I try to advance such understanding, and the constructive destruction it entails, by expanding on my thesis, first propounded more than a half century ago: the idea of mental illness and the apparatus of modern psychiatry as a medical specialty rest on the successful mediclization of malingering-that is, on the popular perception of behaviors called "mental illness" as bona fide medical disease.
Understanding modern psychiatry-the historical forces and the complex economic, legal, political, and social principles and practices that support it-requires understanding the epistemology and sociology of faking in general and counterfeiting disease and disability in particular. Where there are fake disease, there are healthy persons who pretended to be ill and deluded or dishonest doctors who diagnose and treat them. In 1976, protesting the official definition of psychiatry as the diagnosis and treatment of mental disease, I proposed this definition:
The subject matter of psychiatry is neither minds nor mental disease, but lies...
Unneeded Medical Care is Common and Driven by Fear of Malpractice, Physician Survey Concludes
Release Date: September 6, 2017 A new national survey of more than 2,000 physicians across multiple specialties finds that physicians believe overtreatment is common and mostly perpetuated by fear of malpractice, as well as patient demand and some profit motives.
A report on the findings, published Sept. 6 in PLOS ONE, highlights physicians’ perspectives on unnecessary health care practices and the potential causes and solutions.
“Unnecessary medical care is a leading driver of the higher health insurance premiums affecting every American,” says Martin Makary, M.D., M.P.H., professor of surgery and health policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the paper’s senior author.
Unnecessary medical services represent the majority of wasted health care resources and costs in the United States, accounting for an estimated $210 billion in excess spending each year, according to the National Academy of Medicine. Studies consistently show that overtreatment is also directly associated with preventable patient harm and, on a national scale, the issue represents a significant opportunity to make improve patient safety and lower health care costs, Makary notes.
Increasingly, he adds, professional societies and other health care organizations have focused on campaigns to address the unnecessary medical care issue. Initiatives such as Choosing Wisely and Improving Wisely, which focus on reducing unneeded tests and procedures and are endorsed by multiple physician societies, have increased awareness of appropriateness in testing and treatment. Direct estimates by physicians themselves of unnecessary care, however, have been limited.
In an effort to hear from physicians about the magnitude of the “too much medical care” problem, the Johns Hopkins research team — part of a national consortium exploring ways to reduce unneeded care — invited 3,318 physicians from a continuing education subgroup of the American Medical Association’s Physician Masterfile, a database of more than 1.4 million physicians in the United States, to complete a survey about health care practices.
The survey was conducted between Jan. 22 and March 8, 2014, and a total of 2,106 physicians’ responses were included in the published research report.
The majority of the physicians who responded to the survey said they believed that at least 15 to 30 percent of medical care is not needed.
Breaking down the types of unnecessary medical care, survey respondents reported that 22 percent of prescription medications, 24.9 percent of medical tests, 11.1 percent of procedures and 20.6 percent of overall medical care delivered is unnecessary. The median response for physicians who perform unnecessary procedures for profit motive was 16.7 percent. Physicians with at least 10 years of experience after residency and specialists were more likely to believe that physicians perform unnecessary procedures when they profit from them.
“Interestingly, but not surprisingly, physicians implicated their colleagues (more so than themselves) in providing wasteful care. This highlights the need to objectively measure and report wasteful practices on a provider or practice level so that individual providers can see where they might improve,” says Daniel Brotman, M.D., professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an author on the paper.
The top three reasons cited for overuse of resources were fear of malpractice (84.7 percent, or 1,783 of 2,106 respondents), patient pressure/request (59 percent, or 1,242 of 2,106 respondents) and difficulty accessing prior medical records (38.2 percent, or 804 of 2,106 respondents).
The top three selected potential solutions for eliminating unnecessary services were training medical residents on appropriateness criteria for care (55.2 percent, or 1,163 of 2,106 respondents), easy access to outside health records (52 percent, or 1,096 of 2,106 respondents) and more evidence-based practice guidelines (51.5 percent, or 1,084 of 2,106 respondents).
“Most doctors do the right thing and always try to, however, today “too much medical care” has become an endemic problem in some areas of medicine. A new physician-led focus on appropriateness is a promising homegrown strategy to address the problem,” says Makary. Other authors on this paper include Tim Xu, Brandan Mayer-Blackwell, Michol Cooper, Michael Daniel and Elizabeth C. Wick from The Johns Hopkins University; Heather Lyu from Harvard Medical School; and Vikas Saini and Shannon Brownlee from the Lown Institute.
Funding for this research was provided by the Richison Foundation.
How can aggressive and / or predatory tactics such as the opioids crisis impact your health? What does it look like? What protections should their be for you and your loved ones?
If this article was helpful to you, donate to the Shidonna Raven Garden and Cook E-Magazine Today. Thank you in advance.
Comments