Shipman
When can we in the US expect this to be added to the crap preventing doctors from proper care like HMOs, insurance companies, political restrictions on religious grounds like the morning after pill and abortion, and on and on.
‘Shipman effect’ harms pain care
Britain’s worst serial killer, Greater Manchester GP Harold Shipman, murdered elderly patients with opioid drugs which are normally used legitimately to alleviate pain at the end of life.
As a result, some doctors are now reluctant to prescribe them. They fear that if a patient dies of an accidental overdose, they may be branded the new Shipman.
Central London GP Dr Laurence Gerlis has radically changed the way he works as a result of Shipman.
He no longer makes home visits. And he no longer carries or prescribes narcotics, such as diamorphine.
This means he can no longer treat patients who require such drugs, such as people with terminal cancer or acute heart attacks.
“It’s about risk management,” he says. “I want to be above suspicion in every possible way. Which means giving a poorer service to my patients, but taking myself out of harm’s way.”
I believe this is already being addressed here in the states. There was a problem a few years back as doctors began cutting back on pain medication for patients, as in Shipman, for liability reasons. The AMA responded by emphasising pain management. That’s when all those signs began popping up in hospitals and doctors offices with the little charts which showed how to rate your level of discomfort from 1 to 10.
This isn’t too unusual a phenomenon, the minority seem to screw it up for the majority the world over.
I don’t really think there are many aspects of our lives in which a minority group has “screwed it up”, or changed the way things work (for the PC police out there) for everyone.
Politics, workplaces, TV, Games are 4 quick examples I can come up with at the moment.
The above quoted doctor may be violating his Hypocratic Oath if he is not giving what he believes to be the proper medication to his patients and, as a result, allows them to suffer harm they need not suffer.
As much as I sympathize with him, being a doctor is not about doing what will save your ass but what will save the other person’s ass. That’s what the Hypocratic Oath is about at its core. He’s violated that.
Well I hate to say it, but the doctor is correct. He would be OUT OF BUSINESS if he was held to anything close to the SHIPMAN standard. How does being OUT OF BUSINESS (because of hyper-vigilance, over-reaction) helping the public? I do not think we have a surplus of doctors.
so he was just doing to them what was done to Terry Shivo, or the African Immigrant in Texas (who was taken off the iron lung, against her express wishes, if any one wants I can point you to an article about this later. Yes she was awake and begging not to be taken off)
Doctors and insurance companies who let patients suffer are as equally guilty of malpractice and criminal negligence as those very few who have given intentional overdoses. What is wrong here is not having a more open health care process where the work of doctors, hospitals and insurance companies is better documented, graded and subject to more strenuous patient and peer review.
The same dosage risk exist with most medication a patient is given. Using this bottom line driven paranoid rationalization, the only item a doctor should carry is a insurance company certified tongue depressor on a string hanging around his neck, so the patient can’t swallow it.
The only way we could get decent pain relief for my father was to call in Hospice. The regular doctor wanted to play with vicodin with late stage 3 lung cancer. They went to oral morphine and ativan which made the last days bearable. Many MD’s will refer patience to pain clinics because they’re too spooked to write scripts for narcotics. Many people suffer needlessly because of a few abusers.
That’s why marijuana should be legalized.
#5, Michael, yes, I would like to see this woman in the iron lung who was taken off despite her wishes.
Sorry Michael, I searched and can’t find any articles about an African Immigrant in Texas on an iron lung. I think that is a fairly narrow search too. But then when you are called out you never do respond. Just another troll.
All this does is push the desperate to the black market for their pain and thus risk all sorts of other problems as a result. It’s ridiculous how law officials improperly overreact to issues by instituting sweeping general regulations to the detriment of the majority because of a few occurences of impropriety. For example, this is not an issue of pain medication. This is an issue of assisted suicide or homicide and doesn’t matter whether he used pain medication, poison or a gun for that matter. It’s a completely misdirected issue as always happens when people demand easy answers to problems with many compounding/contributing factors.