'Distracted Doctoring?' Lord, Love a Livid Duck. How Imbecilic Can Medicine Possibly Get?
Just how off-the-chart juvenile are "professional" care providers getting? Well, you tell us:
The Paramedic Heretic happens to believe that Americans have a right to expect courteous, adult-level behavior by physicians, whether the patients happen to be awake or not.
We find the thousands of cases of medical misbehavior profoundly disturbing, And when they happen in the surgical suites they are downright insulting to an honorable profession. This medical misbehavior now has a nifty new name: “distracted doctoring.”
Yorkville Endoscopy - Now Closed for Business
Experts in the electronic version of medical misbehavior say, “If they’re texting, tweeting, or reading -they’re not paying attention.”
Here are 3 such cases:
The Case of the Selfish “Selfie”
The death during a routine operation on comedienne Joan Rivers showcased a stunning lapse in common sense, as one of her physicians was found to have been taking cell phone snapshots during the procedure.
Medical staff at Manhattan's Yorkville Endoscopy, told investigators looking into the death of Rivers, age 81, that, “Doctor Korovin was taking selfies with the unconscious Rivers with her personal phone. She was under anesthesia at this point. Everyone in the operating room was stunned. They'd never witnessed anyone do that before.”
The Case of the Secret Medical Recording:
A colonoscopy patient accidentally left his cellphone on “record” after taping instructions from his doctor. The result was that his phone, folded in his clothing nearby, recorded an entire conversation among his colonoscopy team. What the surgeon said went beyond insulting. During the procedure the team of 3 joked in a highly personal manner about the naked patient. When he heard the recording later, the patient was humiliated, and sued the clinic. The jurors who listened to the offensive recording in court, were as stunned as the judge. They awarded the patient $500,000.
You can listen to the recording yourself and hear the misbehaving medical team.
The Case of the Social Network Nitwit:
In the death in Texas of a 61-year-old woman, who died during a low-risk heart procedure, police discovered that the anesthesiologist had been on his iPad through the duration of the procedure for more than 30 minutes after she turned blue from receiving no oxygen.
The doctor later confessed that he routinely read e-books and surfed websites during operations, when he was supposed to be monitoring pulse oxygen levels and checking blood pressure, The patient went brain-dead as he was busy playing with his plastic toy behind the surgical drapes.
We believe it's time for 'zero tolerance' of all the childlike medical shenanigans. It is beyond time to ban social media capability by medical staff in patient care areas and start spanking a few degreed butts.
We are not alone in our outcry. Doctor Peter Papadakos, an anesthesiologist with the University of Rochester, says this: “It is a problem in operating rooms and emergency rooms alike: Nurses, technicians, and physicians glued to Smartphones, tablets, and even laptops instead of patients.”
We kind of liked it back in simpler times, when a little loud music - say, the Eagles "Hotel California" - kept the patient care tedium to a minimum.