Lasik Eyes Surgery - Law suits, doctors, patients, relationships, transparency

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Law suits, doctors, patients, relationships, transparency

Brent Hanson - LASIKFRAUD.com

2005-09-26, 5:23 pm

Law suits, doctors, patients, relationships, transparency
By Kent Bottles

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am fascinated by the
doctor/patient relationship. I have blogged on this subject often, and
I have pocast interviews with thoughtful experts on this subject like
Carl E. Schneider.Today brought more evidence that neither doctors nor
patients are all that thrilled by the state of the doctor/patient
relationship. Techdirt in "Doctors Furious That People Might Criticize
Them Online" (http://techdirt.com/articles/20050914/1318205_F.shtml)
looks at doctors from the point of view of a veteran of the World Wide
Web.

He notes that we physicians are well known late adopters. "Perhaps
that's why they've just recently gotten around to discovering that on
this world wide web we've all been using, it's possible for people to
post their opinions -- including opinions about the treatment they
received from doctors." He then notes that some doctors have been suing
their patients who post critical comments on the Internet. "These
doctors get written up in the Wall Street Journal as trying to hide the
complaints, rather than respond to them." He then references the
Streisand Effect which refers to the actress's lawsuit trying to remove
a picture of her house from the 12,000 photos available on the Internet
that documented the entire California coast. By calling attention to
her house with her legal action, she made the photo of her house an
Internet Hit.

David Kesmodel in "As Angry Patients Vent Online, Doctors Sue to
Silence Them" discusses the whole issue of doctors, patients, and the
Internet by describing the lawsuit of Dr. [ name redacted ] against his
patient Dan Morikawa who was not happy with the results of his Lasik
surgery. A settlement included shutting down the Internet sites with
the patient criticism.

A spokesman for the American Dental Association said in the article,
"My reputation is my stock in trade...To have that shattered
potentially (by an Internet posting) is a concern." Predictably the
president of the People's Medical Society has a different point of
view: "Blogs and personal Web sites are no different than talking over
the back fence. Those who read it have to take it with whatever grain
of salt you would take, just like a neighbor. It's too bad if doctors
are insulted by this."
Although some physicians and dentists are successfully suing to remove
negative comments from the Internet, I really believe that this is in
the long run a bad strategy to take. It just reinforces the public
perception that the providers are less interested in serving their
patients than in hiding something. As I have posted in two previous
blogs, I regard transparency as a megatrend in the 21st century that
cannot be stopped. I would always side on the side of more, not less,
transparency.

Some in the medical blogosphere agree that transparency is the way to
go. World of Psychology reported on the Wall Street Journal article by
commenting: "Doctors have long enjoyed limited policing and certainly
very little public information about their reliability and
effectiveness. I man, c'mon, it would be unreasonable to assume that
all doctors are of the same quality. Some are great, some are mediocre,
some are poor. How else can people figure this out, since doctors
themselves (and their professional associations) have no reason to
provide such useful information to consumers?"

Galen's Log wonders if he should start suing Olive Garden when he has
wait to dine on Italian food and links to a Kevin item where lawyers in
Australia are suing doctors who make them wait for an appointment.
Which brings me to the last article in my musings today: "'It's All
Your Fault': Why Americans Can't Stop Playing the Blame Game." (Wall
Street Journal, September 15, 2005). Jeffrey Zaslow in this article
writes, "The urge to blame is an innate human impulse dating back a
million years or more." "If a group of early humans thought their
survival was threatened because a member wasn't carrying his load
--hunting, gathering, whatever--they'd point fingers, throw rocks, even
commit murder." And now in the 21st century, file a lawsuit instead of
murder. I guess that is an improvement of sorts. I guess.

The article makes an interesting point that we blame because we lack
the skills to problem-solve. Cathryn Bond Doyle is quoted, "Blame is
about the past, and about words. Problem-solving focuses on the future
and is about actions."

I believe physicians would do well to look toward the future and think
about actions that will allow them to utilize all this new IT and
scientific technology to take better care of our patients. The blame
game and lawsuits, in my opinion, are a waste of energy when it comes
to the doctor/patient relationship.

Complete article is available at:
www.soundpractice.net/article.cfm?id=201