I'll bet his patient satisfaction scores are sky-high.
He could certainly be acquitted of the murder charges if there is insufficient evidence that he intended to kill people. The fact that he was indicted on murder charges means it's what the DA's office wanted. Maybe they are trying to make an example of him because of the opioid abuse epidemic.
I agree. I was unfamiliar with the "felony murder" concept, but no matter how much precedent it has, it makes me uncomfortable. I just don't see how we can consider a person just as culpable for a death as an indirect result of recklessness as if they had actively killed the victim. Isn't that why we have the concept of manslaughter?
Wow, the 6th largest Medicare population in the state. And the article about the Chinese doctor in California said her practice "raked in millions of dollars." The fact that these stories make the news every so often makes you wonder how many other docs out there spent their careers "practicing" this way, never getting caught, and are now enjoying opulent retirements while we make $220k a year cranking out 99214's.
Our SP department does have difficult patient encounters as part of the preclinical curriculum. None of the difficult patient encounters involve drug-seeking behavior. The fundamental defect with that training, though, is that the feedback they provide is such that if you didn't make the patient happy, it was somehow your fault. While that may sometimes be true, on rotations I've learned that often times (especially with prescribing potentially addictive drugs), it is doing the right thing that makes a patient upset.
I'll never forget that one of the first things we were told in our "soft skills" course 1st year in medical school was never to interrupt a patient. As though that would be possible with a chronic pain patient, or a manic patient. What's going on is a phenomenon of "doctor guilt," just like white guilt. The philosophy in modern liberal society is that in any interaction, the more powerful person, the wealthier person, the person with more authority, the "higher," is the bad guy, and the "lower" is the good guy. For a doctor to be firm with a patient, to tell him what to do, or tell him "no," is seen as a marker of paternalism, of the bad old days of authoritarian white men with their boot on the neck of everyone else.
And the US medical system seems to resist the idea that the government could know what's best for it. Same transaction, different actors.
The government's not some magical being. It's made up of people who probably know just about as much about any given (non-top-secret) thing as people who aren't in the government. There's no clear knowledge asymmetry. So I'll have to disagree with that analogy.
I was making a very general point about the medical system, not specifically doctors. In fact I was thinking more about the insurance component of the medical system. The government can look at how much it is spending on healthcare, what the outcomes are at a population level, and whether anything should change as a result of looking at those two things. There is generally a resistance on the part of the insurance industry for changes that cut it out that becomes expressed through politicians in a patron-client relationship. It's fairly analogous to it just being easier for doctors to do what patients want and refusing to say no.
The point I was making was not that it's easier for doctors to do what patients want and refuse to say no, it was that there's an overarching philosophy among the elites of our society, the movers and shakers, which includes the leaders of the medical profession--people like med school deans--that the powerful are bad and the weak are good. The same people who think the bad old days of paternalism, of stodgy old white male doctors giving "orders" to their patients, were so bad, think the government is good and the medical system is bad. So the analogy doesn't hold.
Not the same thing at all because physicians can and are successfully sued all the time for negligent prescribing - what's murky is criminal prosecution for this. In contrast the firearm industry enjoys some protection from liability from the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that other industries do not. Personally I do find it somewhat questionable suing manufacturers for this sort of thing etc, but the question is a broader one which is - do people have the right to sue? Whether the case is ultimately successful or not is another question altogether, but often these cases aren't even given a hearing.
Yep that's par for the course with the DEA--and it basically discourages primary care docs, general psychiatrists, etc from getting a Suboxone waiver...so the divide between addicts and treatment is further widened...
Before or after they have nasal issues?🤣
I think you're intentionally misrepresenting that list. "Crack" is only listed as an "other name" for cocaine. The "other names" column is simply a way of saying "heads up: here's another way you might hear this substance referred to." It also lists "crank" and "speed" as other names for methamphetamine, which apparently (I didn't even know this) is a schedule II substance FDA approved for ADHD. So do you criticize them for saying you can prescribe "crank" or "speed" but not pot?
