Texas Medical Board Under Fire

[medicinesux]

[YOUTUBE]SKwcVWvJX1A[/YOUTUBE]

Dealing with the Texas Medical Board is about to get alot more painful

Here's the mentioned article from the Dallas Morning News:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcon...edboard_11pro.ART.State.Edition1.4c107ef.html

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[RegularNihilist]

An online campaign against abusive docs and molesters could sort these fellas out, without having to sustain a protectionist licensure system.

I never hear anything about plumbers having their licence revoked, after a major leak flooding the basement, drowning the youngsters of a family, an electrician having his licence revoked due to fires, etc. By having licensure rules, docs can never feel safe, like this insane threat of being deprived of your means of income if you offend enough ppl with power, and their sense of professionalism.

 

[reedman]

ok people convicted of sex crimes should obviously be in jail. but assuming one has gotten out of jail time with a fancy lawyer, what about a radiologist or pathologist who may never touch a patient? that might require a different action by the medical board than for a pediatrician. like most sensationalist news stories, we really need more information than they give us to think about this issue intelligently.

 

[NotAProgDirector]

As others have pointed out, the issue is not so clear cut.

1. There is no question that the BOM should "police" the system and should remove the license / limit privileges / set restrictions on physicians who clearly endanger patients.

2. Giving the BOM wide discretion is complicated, as if they remove your license you are essentially out of business. It's reportable to all the other states, who are likely to follow suit. One could imagine a story of the chairperson of a BOM simply removing the license of a competitor, or just someone that they don't like. Even if it was appealed and successful, losing you license for a short period of time will cost you your job, all of your patients, etc.

3. Is the BOM really staffed to review all these cases? Getting to the bottom of any story like this is complicated. Hosiptals and physicians are unlikely to hand over records willingly, knowing that these records could also be used in a medmal suit. Hence, you'll have lawyers, subpeonas, quashing, the whole nine yards -- very expensive and time consuming.

4. Should the BOM take the primary role of punishment, or remediation? An interesting question. The drunk MD who kills someone by failing to intubate, for example. certainly, they are going to be sued by the family and lose (assuming the family knows the whole story). Should the doc be forever prohibited from working? Or, if they get treated and are EtOH free, then should they get to work again? What if they just have a high EtOH level but no patient harm happens? Is that really any different? It's not so clear, at least to me.

5. What should happen to physicians during the investigation? Should they get to continue working? If not, their practices could go bankrupt. If so, they could put someone else in harm's way.

6. Where does this stop? if you make an error as a resident, is that it for your career?

There is no question that in the article, there are some crazy seeming situations -- docs who expose themselves / abuse children continuing to practice as child psychiatrists. This is completely crazy. Docs with clear evidence of unacceptable behavior need to be stopped.

 

[LosAngeles77]

Valid point, not all people in medicine are actually dealing with children directly. At least the news story said the ones convicted of sex crimes with children are not allowed to be around children. At least Texas is doing something right. Better than the Los Angeles clinic the had the radiation on their CT scanners 8x higher than they were supposed to.

ok people convicted of sex crimes should obviously be in jail. but assuming one has gotten out of jail time with a fancy lawyer, what about a radiologist or pathologist who may never touch a patient? that might require a different action by the medical board than for a pediatrician. like most sensationalist news stories, we really need more information than they give us to think about this issue intelligently.

 

[Socrates25]

2. Giving the BOM wide discretion is complicated, as if they remove your license you are essentially out of business. It's reportable to all the other states, who are likely to follow suit. One could imagine a story of the chairperson of a BOM simply removing the license of a competitor, or just someone that they don't like. Even if it was appealed and successful, losing you license for a short period of time will cost you your job, all of your patients, etc.

I disagree that other states "follow the lead" of medical boards when revoking/suspending licenses. There's a clearly established trend of bad doctors who cut off wrong limbs or get drunk on the job having their license suspended/revoked in one state and simply moving next door to set up shop with no problems. The surgeon in Hawaii who used a screwdriver as a stabilizing rod in a patient (who later became septic and died) had already had his license revoked in 2 states prior to that incident.

3. Is the BOM really staffed to review all these cases? Getting to the bottom of any story like this is complicated. Hosiptals and physicians are unlikely to hand over records willingly, knowing that these records could also be used in a medmal suit. Hence, you'll have lawyers, subpeonas, quashing, the whole nine yards -- very expensive and time consuming.

This is the real problem, IMHO. State boards are incredibly overworked. Most of them only have 2-3 employees who investigate doctors. Thats barely enough to keep up with the really egregious stuff like sexually assaulting patients, much less stay on top of repeated medical negligence. The problem here is that state medical boards are funded by state taxpayer dollars, and they arent given enough money by the state. You can either raise taxes to pay for this (politically unpopular) or vastly increase the fees that doctors pay for registration/licensure to pay for more investigators.

Another big problem you didnt mention is the lawyers. Scumbag lawyers in addition to sueing docs for malpractice, also DEFEND scumbag docs who need to stop practicing. Its very common for a doctor who gets reprimanded by the board to hire a fancy attorney who will throw motion after motion at the medical board and get a sympathetic judge to make the board delay any negative disciplinary measures, even against the worst of the worst offenders such as sexual predators. It gets very expensive and time consuming for medical boards to continue actions against these doctors. Often times the doc will win the war of attrition and avoid any real punishment by the board. New laws need to be put in place that give medical boards more power to discipline freely without having every action blocked by a judge for years at a time.

 

[dragonfly99]

Medical boards already appear to have wide leeway in investigating people and seem to have little regard for many licensure applicants.
Lucky for me, I have a very bland application with no gaps in training, etc. but I know a couple of people who were great trainees and top students but still having trouble getting licenses in certain states. The boards appear to spend a lot of time trolling/digging for "dirt" on licensure applicants, instead of actually going after the real evil doers, who appear to be few in number. Maybe if they quit digging for dirt on every single person who ever had another doc or nurse say 1 thing bad about him/her once time, or trained in more than 1 residency program for whatever reason, they'd actually have time to revoke the licenses of the druggies and child molesters.