Physicians 'failure to report' could kill you

Dear Reader,

There are lots of great doctors out there. In fact, I know a number of them personally. But, unfortunately, it seems that for every good doc there’s a bad apple doing his best to spoil the whole darn barrel.

I told you before about some of the outrageous actions by these bad apples like the doctors in “America’s docs too lazy to get diagnosis right” who choose to ignore their own guidelines when diagnosing major depressive disorder. Or the doctors who are cozying up with Big Pharma that I told you about in “Docs and Big Pharma sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”

Now, a new survey, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, has revealed that despite being required to do so by state and professional organizations, many doctors don’t accept the responsibility for reporting impaired or incompetent colleagues.

First the half-baked “good news”: The majority of the 3,500 doctors surveyed did agree that they have a professional obligation to report a colleague who is significantly impaired or incompetent.

But that’s where the good news comes to a screeching halt.

While 64% did feel they have an obligation to report their dangerous co-workers, that means, of course, that 36% don’t even feel they should have any responsibility to do so. We’re talking slightly more than one-third of the doctors surveyed.

And it gets worse.

Of the 17% of respondents who admitted to direct personal knowledge of an impaired or incompetent physician in the past three years, only 67% of them bothered to report the colleague.

I’ll admit that math isn’t my strong suit, but if I did my arithmetic correctly this means that, in this small sampling alone, there were 196 doctors that chose to simply allow a dangerous colleague to continue practicing medicine...possibly on you or a loved one...without reporting him.

If you roll those results out to the approximately 855,000 practicing physicians in the United States, the numbers get even more chilling. We’re talking about potentially 47,965 unreported cases of incompetence in the past three years alone. And I shudder to think about the medical mistakes...and even deaths...that those impaired doctors are already responsible for.

Equally as frightening is that there’s absolutely no safety net in place for this situation. Medicine relies on physicians to detect and report these problems. And let’s be honest…mainstream medicine has never shown a great ability to self-regulate.

The bottom line is we need better education, better regulation, and better reporting, because at this rate we’re going to need to institute a policy of mandatory drug-tests at the start of each shift and Breathalyzers in the operating room.