"One patient who suffered a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair told
WMUR9, 'I wouldn't have my life without her.'
Another patient said doctors had him on seven different medications and with Konopka he's down to just one and it has been working."
That part was extremely worrying.
How long until that guy dies of another stroke?
Also, why is it that every doctor that "people who have run out of options go to" is a giant quack?
Statistics, she takes patients that no one else will because it screws their scorecard. To wit:
1. I knew surgeons who would carry their own blood packets into surgeries so that if there was a complication, it would not need to be entered into the ARC system for blood use (and not count against them). I really got pissed at this practice as it breaks all reasonable precautions about testing with Path as well as royally messing up our blood ration requests to ARC (as the DoD and VA get special consideration for blood and blood products). ARC and CMS only clamped down on this practice in the last year or so.
2. Along with their own hospitalists, keep brainstem-dead patients on life support until 48 hours had passed to evade CMS postsurgical complication death reports. VA no longer tolerates specialist directed internal medicine service requests without written justification.
(Reason I pick on surgeons in this case is that their cases are fairly straightforward to explain, there's other ways to do this in IM and Peds, but they are a bit more involved and not obvious.)
If you know you have a trainwreck that you can't recoup your CPT reimbursement, you figure out a way to dump them. In this lady's defense, she really doesn't care about those statistics, so she would take cases where no one would. Ben Carson is also that kind of surgeon, who would take cases that no one else would, because he didn't give a damn about his statistics. That thinking has both its merits and demerits. On the demerit side, there are truly hopeless cases that don't justify the resources, and if you work in a place where bean counting is a thing, then you just can't take those patients, but JHU isn't one of those places yet. On the merit side, you do make miracles happen at the expense that your routine statistics are atrocious limiting your reimbursement and raising your malpractice rates.
It says something about the practice systems of medicine in general though that despite her losing her practice skill, that more harm did not happen. You can actually have a quack and not come to harm most of the time. Not something I'd actually want to say to reassure people, but modernity does bring life support benefits that our grandparents did not have.
