M.D?
Medical Doctor? Mental Defective?
Morally Destitute?
The Profession Has Lost Its Character
Character?
Trustworthiness. Respect. Responsibility.
Fairness. Caring. Citizenship.
The Six Pillars
of Character are ethical values to guide our choices. The standards of conduct
that arise out of those values constitute the ground rules of ethics, and
therefore of ethical decision-making.
Doctors!
Who are they?
The
Canadian Medical Association represents the 67000 modern doctors practicing in Canada. To introduce you to my
concept of what Medical Practice should be, I’m simply going to compare the
conduct of the majority of those members, to that of just one man of character,
a real Doctor,
still in practice at the beginning of the decline. His name was Dr. T.W.E.
Henry and he was the local physician in Ft. Saskatchewan, Alberta where I grew up. At that
time the town was about pop. 250 and we were a community who considered him
next to Jesus for his Samaritan conduct, common sense and good advice.
Dr.
Henry was the center of our social system, he was trusted above all others and
he knew every secret and personal detail about every one of his flock. He was a
part of every family in town and often if he happened to make a house call at
lunch or tea time he would stop for a coffee or to share a meal and take the
time to get updated on the family history. He was a skilled interrogator and
asked personal questions in such a manner that he created a desire to answer
because he would understand and never condemn.
One
evening near Christmas I and my family were visiting and just as supper hit the
table TWE got a call and he was needed by a
sick child. 10-15 degrees below zero, snowing like hell, winds harsh and gusty,
driving clouds of icy particles that skin your face like sandpaper. No bloody
way I was going out in that! Not!
Blaine! Get with it! I might need a push
and you’re it! Crap: on with all the layers, boots, scarves, gloves! All the
bulky crap that make wading though powder snow like wading through a swamp and
then the open door and Holy Shit its nasty out here. Naturally the damned car
won’t start so I harness the team, hook up his runabout sleigh, load the old
fart up grab the reins and off we go into nowhere.
You
don’t really drive horses in a blizzard: you just sort of aim them and trust
them to figure out where the center of the road is. You just sit there and squint
and squint trying to pick out landmarks in the little gaps between white sheets
of snow. Fortunately it was a straight 5 mile run and only took about an hour
and a half to get to the destination.
Modern
people have no idea what kind of rotten conditions a lot of poor farm families
lived in the 50’s. This was one such family and they were toughing out the
blizzard in a two room clapboards shack heated by two stoves, one in the
kitchen and a barrel type wood stove in the main room. Unless you have felt it
you cannot imagine the drafts in a shack built of planks, you don’t know how
cold the air is inside a house with iced up single pane windows. Stand next to
one and suddenly your arm is radiated with cold from the glass.
It
was a little guy about three and he was sick, you knew he was simply by
looking. I don’t know what was wrong but after a long examination by TWE he was given a tablespoon
of some syrup, handed back to his mother and she was told that he didn’t think
it was serious but he’d like that fever to break. “Take that goose grease you
have on the front stove warmer, warm him up, rub him down with it then wrap him
up in that flannel blanket and put him to bed. He’s already so tired he’ll fall
asleep quickly. He should feel better in the morning but if he doesn’t give me
a call and we’ll take care of it.”
We
got ready to leave and the husband came over to TWE and explained they were
a little short on cash, would he take a couple of chickens as payment. TWE simply told him “John
you’ll need them more than I do right now. Tell you what you’re good with a
hammer and saw. Come over when the weather gets good in the spring and I’ve got
a back porch that needs some repair. What do you say to an Even Steven deal?”
John simply looked at him and I thought he would cry, but he just swallowed
hard, nodded his agreement and shook TWE’s hand. We left
That
was one example of his character at work: it is also the reason why he
represents the best aspects of the generations of his predecessors. His
position as a respected and admired man of character
made him worthy to bear the title Doctor
Cannabis
has been prescribed by Doctors, Medicine men, Shamans for now 4800
years. For 4750 of those years this medication was freely prescribed by a
person of trust who had the best interest of the patient in mind. The witch
doctor was trusted because he knew every aspect of his patient’s life. He was
part of a tight community that no longer exists, and his reward was not
financial gain at patient expense but a position of respect and trust far above
that of any other profession. The current crop of medicine men, and I call them
that because they do not deserve the title of Doctor, are simply skilled
technicians who lack the moral and ethical quality to earn the respect they are
granted as physicians.
From
that point in the past, we fast forward to the present and it is only men of my
age has the knowledge of what the title Doctor Represents in terms of how it is earned
and expects little from his current Physician. We knew a Model for Comparison and
there is no Expectation of Samaritan acts that demonstrate the qualities
inherent in the 6 Pillars of Character: Trustworthiness. Respect. Responsibility.
Fairness. Caring. Citizenship. These have been lost by the Profession.
The
Destruction of Ethical Medical Practice
The
practice of medicine has gradually changed into a commercially structured and
oriented system designed to derive maximum profit. This was created from the
sheer volume of patients that became available as a result of post WWII
urbanization. Instead of a couple of dozen or hundred patients in his community,
every doctor had a chance to bag any number of visits from the occupants of the
hundreds of tenements surrounding them.
Appointments
got shorter and further apart separated by many intruding and competing
strangers’ entries into a doctor’s capacity to remember his diagnosis and
previous treatment for the new volume of patients. Thus came into being the
Personal Medical Record to serve as a reminder when a physician’s memory
failed. The natural result was simple neglect to bother to remember Mickey
Mouse details: a one minute skim of the patent’s last visit began to serve as
the entire content of a physician’s knowledge of his patient. There began the
complete lack of empathy now apparent in the profession at large and its
absence was accompanied by the eventual loss of all character from the
profession. That is simple fact.
A
modern day patient with any problem needing medical attention assumes that when
they make an appointment with their physician they are going to see a Doctor.
They are not: they are making an appointment with an M.D. (Medical Doctor) a
university graduate who had the minimal qualification to join a College of Physicians with lack standards and
qualify to open an office.
His first act after qualification to
practice was not to do Samaritan work at the local shelters, but rather, a call
to his lawyer and accountant and to approve the creation of his new practice,
Dr. False Front, MD, Inc. Shyster and BeanCounter Consulting already had the necessary plans
approved, the forms got filed and the fees got paid. From this point on the man
across the desk; the MD in the modern medical office, presents himself as
worthy to wear the honorific title Doctor and expects all the respect and trust
due him for a title based on Character.
He is actually talking to President CEO of the TYMAR Corp acting as the sucker
mechanism for the TakeYourMoneyAndRun machine.
To clarify the difference between a Doctor and President,
MD, only one simple comparison is required. Imagine wandering down a
deserted wasteland road and encountering a man with a severe wound needing
medical help. His wound is not fatal but without treatment soon will be if not
helped. How would each react to that situation?
I think:
1.
The Doctor would stop, assess the situation, accept
the man as a a patient, pack the wound, stop the bleeding and then arrange for
his care until recovery.
2.
The President, MD would
stop, frisk the man to see if he had the cash or credit to pay for treatment,
if not kick him in the ditch. It would probably never occur to him to call an
ambulance to get charity involved. That would take too much time and he already
had a cash customer waiting for the sales pitch. “Sorry. I can’t be bothered
guy, die in peace.
If I am disillusioned it is
rightfully so. The machine has no recognition of the patient, only his symptoms
are used to maximize the medical billing opportunities and tap them all. Office
visits = Prescriptions benefits = repeat = referral to higher priced care of
specialists= over-reliance on technology= excess testing = everybody happy and
rich = CMA.
The President, MD across the desk
does not know his patents, has no idea how they live, or anything about
them beyond their ability to pay and the chart details of the last visit. They do not want to know or be bothered by
their patients outside of Office Hours. They move in invisible circles away
from the common herd, superior circles by
virtue of greed! Away from the place of business they do not exist and
cannot be found. They have no addresses, unlisted home phones, and undisclosed
and rigidly guarded e-mail. They long ago abandoned house calla and after hour
phone calls are answered by recorded direction to go to emergency.
Suddenly the majority of these 67000
MD’s fly in the face of common sense and are balking at allowing Medical
Cannabis, and its benefits, on the basis that they don’t have sufficient
knowledge of the long term harmful effects of smoking it.
Bullshit! They discount 4750 years
of testimonial evidence passed down by all the preceding generations of real Doctors who freely advocated it for its
curative power and lack of risk in its use.
Bullshit!
Today’s Doctors all claim to honour what was the primary tenet of the Hippocratic Oath: “FIRST, DO NO HARM”. Nobody reveals that this guiding principle has been removed from the Hippocratic Oath Modern Version and has not been replaced by an equivalent prohibition.. The Watered Down Oath may be seen in its current form as approved by John Hopkins at
http://guides.library.jhu.edu/content.php?pid=23699&sid=190964
I find it interesting that given the
respect they are sworn to hold for their predecessor’s intelligence, in another
part of the oath they dismiss all the traditional knowledge that Cannabis has
shown no harm from occasional or even lifelong use. They swear: “I will respect the “hard-won scientific gains” of those
physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine
with those who are to follow”.
To claim harm for a product all
preceding generations of doctors recommend is to hold their collective intelligence
in contempt. To dismiss all of it in favour of the hard-won scientific gains of last 50 years of billing possibility experts, who don’t even know who their patients are,
is probably the grossest display of the lack of simple common sense I could
have imagined from any profession. They have completely lost touch with the
populace they are supposed to be serving.
I hear no outcry from the medical ethics experts: Where are they? because the ethical deficiency list is horrendous! I could keep on ranting forever but I don’t have to. Following is a simple listing of the components of Character from
Making Ethical Decisions
The Six Pillars of Character
Simply reading the Index is enough to awaken almost anyone
to the manifold shortcomings of the Profession. It seems every little word
harkens memories of little things noticed that didn’t add up until now
Character:
• Trustworthiness- Honesty
- Integrity
- Reliability (Promise-keeping)
- Loyalty
• Respect
- Civility, Courtesy and Decency
- Dignity and Autonomy
- Tolerance and Acceptance
• Responsibility
- Accountability
- Pursuit of Excellence
- Self-Restraint
• Fairness
- Process
- Impartiality
- Equity
• Caring
• Citizenship
Can you smell the rot too?
Blaine Barrett
