Have you noticed how healthcare providers, from low level staff up to the ones we laughingly call healers have adopted a new tone? Not in their advertisements meant to lure new victims (aka patients) into their profit-making operation, but to actual patients. When was the last time you walked into a doctor’s office and were left standing at the receptionist’s window while she (almost always a female) finished conversing with another staff member or chatting on her cell? When was the last time you tried to speak to your doctor and wound up talking to an assistant or tried to make an appointment with a specialist and were informed that the doctor didn’t see patients on their first or even second visit? You are relegated to the staff PA (physician assistant) or APRN (advanced practice registered nurse). As lower paid employees, to the tune of three or four times lower, their value lies in keeping doctors out of treatment rooms, decreasing their interaction with patients, so that they can concentrate on the main goal — raking in the profits. (70% of doctors are no longer in private practice and are employed by corporate hospitals, or private equity or other corporate entities bent on maximizing their investment). On your second or third visit the doctor will rush into the treatment room and give you nine minutes of face time. Have questions? In most cases, patients are so cowed they don’t dare ask them.
Unfortunately, this transformation of the doctor-patient relationship is now seen by most patients as business as usual, its dehumanizing effect SOP (standard operating procedure). Undeterred by the facts, the medical cabal has brainwashed the majority of Americans into believing that the doctor is always right. The facts tell a different story. Every year at least one quarter of a million Americans pay with their lives for medical errors [Johns Hopkins Study released in 2016] Mistakes by healthcare providers in and out of hospitals have become the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
The indignities suffered by patients in doctors’ office don’t hold a candle to the increasing authoritarianism they encounter in hospitals. Hospitals, non-profit and profit-making alike, have become big business with the same crass ethics as the rest of the business community. Profit is king. Let’s say you’re having hip replacement surgery. About a month before, you are informed that you are required to have a “physical.” Before healthcare became the property of profit-seeking corporations and hospitals that was the job of your personal physician. When healthcare executives realized the money they were leaving on the table, they decided it was time to get into the highly profitable pre-surgical physical business. Chances are even if you persist in having a physical with your own PCP, the hospital will give you a cursory check-up so they can bill for it.
Even before your run-in at the hospital, another unpleasant surprise awaits. Since the least profitable aspect of surgery comes at the end, the task of closing the patient up is generally handed off to one of the doctor’s underlings allowing the doctor to fit in an extra profit-making opportunity (another surgery).
Before your surgery, the hospital makes sure you know who’s boss. They’ve even figured out a work-around that bothersome matter of “informed consent.” Your right to make the final decision on all aspects of your treatment. Here’s how it’s supposed to work— “Patients have the right to receive information and ask questions about recommended treatments so that they can make well-considered decisions about care.” [AMA (American Medical Association) code of medical “ethics”] Most hospitals even have a section in their “mission statement” that they laughingly call “Patients’ Rights (trusting that no patient will ever read it) containing the same blather. In most states, informed consent is the law. Not that any state watch dog makes sure it happens. So it doesn’t.
The medical bureaucracy has whittled down that requirement from informed consent to consent. The informed part is generally ignored. In the few minutes before the actual surgery while the patient is lying on the surgical gurney, the consent form is whipped out. Patients are in no position to do anything more than sign-away their rights, without even knowing what they are. So much for the patient “making well-considered decision about care” in this era of authoritarian medicine.
Why is informed consent important? Informed consent allows patients to lead the parade when it comes to decisions about their care. Problem is most of them don’t even know they have the right — or the obligation —to meet their doctors before surgery and make sure they are comfortable with the course of treatment or change it if they are not. The decisions you make before giving your informed consent may save your life.
