(Snippets from the frontline)
Start a revolution
To my colleagues:
Throughout the nation, we convene at education meetings to coalesce evidence-based information improving medical care.
Missing at these conferences is how physician decision-making is now compromised by hospitals, insurance and pharmaceutical companies, alongside lobby-influenced legislators.
Lack of recognizing this problem underscores how doctors have become unwitting puppets used by profiteers at the expense of patients.
There are many brave physicians whose voices are muffled as they fight in rebellion attempting to expose this assault. These courageous “minutemen” and “minutewomen” should be allowed input at these meetings.
Those crying “To arms, to arms….” are:
Health Care Renewal
Physicians Organizing Committee
Practicing Physicians of America
Physicians Working Together
Let My Doctor Practice
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
Union of American Physicians and Dentists.
And there are more in this uprising attempting to enlighten the public.
Get your blinders off doctors and raise your voice.
Start a revolution!
Your patients are counting on you.
Gene Uzawa Dorio, M.D.
Sadly, the only meetings where my voice has been consistently sought are meetings of trial lawyers.
Several trial lawyers got me into a meeting with a number of US House members a few years ago, to speak about healthcare IT risks, because they were horrified at the cases they had to prosecute. One of the lawyers had grown up with one of the US House members.
The US House members were nearly unaware of the risks of bad health IT. The mechanism to get me in there should have been via organized medicine, not via trial lawyers who had seen EHR disasters.
To date, no defense lawyers have invited me to speak on these risk factors.
Please add Beyond the Exam Room to your list. We are a Physicians Educating Physicians about these very issues to which you refer. The things that we weren’t taught in medical school or training, and these are the very issues that are prohibiting us as physicians, individually and collectively. We must know our worth, and use our voices to be the change and not victims of it.