Views Vary On Discipline For Doctors

Granted there are many good doctors out there and mistakes can happen. Some medical practitioners however, are downright negligent and consistently so. I call them psychopathic doctors. They are psychopathic in my view because they consistently and knowingly put their patients in harms way, cause harm, and have the cojones to try to shirk responsibility and avoid the consequences. When they do get punished it is often a slap on the wrist compared to the damage they actually cause.

Here an interesting article from the NY times regarding the difficulties of punishing the psychopathic doctor. For the real reason why a brush up on psychopathy may be in order.

Published: January 6, 2001

When the New York State Department of Health said last winter that Dr. Ehud Arbit had operated on the wrong side of a patient's brain, it presented the case as rock solid.

Investigators had interviewed dozens of witnesses at Staten Island University Hospital, where he was chief of neurosurgery, to corroborate the state's findings of various medical misdeeds, officials said. Dr. Arbit had also been accused of making the same error five years ago. The health commissioner, Dr. Antonia Novello, was so sure of her case that she forced the doctor to hand over his license while awaiting a hearing.

But a hearing committee charged with deciding Dr. Arbit's fate saw things differently. It cleared the doctor this week of most of the charges against him, upholding only one serious charge involving a spinal surgery. And though the committee found Dr. Arbit grossly negligent in that case, its penalty -- supervised probation -- stunned and incensed Dr. Novello, who immediately moved to appeal the decision.

How could there be such a disparity between a rare but serious set of allegations by the Department of Health and the ultimate finding of a hearing committee appointed by the commissioner

Read more