BlogDoctors Who Do Harm
Posted by: David Patton Good physicians know the bad ones in their midst. Why don't they point fingers? No one knows how many chronically bad doctors are out there. But a recent survey of 1,600 physicians by Columbia University's Institute on Medicine as a Profession revealed that 46 percent of the doctors in the survey had witnessed 'serious' medical errors by their colleagues without reporting them. This was true even though 93 percent said they realized they should turn such doctors in. In 2006 the state of Maryland employed only ten investigators to oversee 17,000 doctors, leading to a backlog of 400 cases. Complaints routinely take three years to resolve, according to a Baltimore Sun investigation. But even when doctors are sanctioned, they usually keep practicing. One Maryland physician continued to see patients after settling three malpractice claims in five years, including one involving a death. No information about his history turned up on the state's public database. Research shows that doctors disciplined by their state medical boards were three times as likely to have exhibited unprofessional behavior when they were medical students. 'The tradition of professionalism must begin in medical school,' says study author Dr. Maxine Papadakis, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. ' The people who know what's going on are on the inside,' says Rosemary Gibson, coauthor of Wall of Silence, a book about this phenomenon. 'But there's more courage now. More of them are speaking out.' http://www.rd.com/columnists/michael-crowley/outrageous-doctors-who-do-harm/article.html Make a Difference
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