THE
The Pennsylvania Department of State's
Medical Board is tasked with protecting the public health and safety. That responsibility
in fact, is the very basis for their existence. A performance check, however,
reveals the Board has failed miserably in fulfilling that obligation. The score
on disciplinary / licensure action against
The situation I've described does not come
about by chance. My initial assumptions have been to blame it on party politics
at its worst. Special interest groups, in this case, doctor and hospital organizations,
having forged their will with the Ridge/Schweiker administration over the
safety of medical consumers. However, it is now early June 2005 and there has
been plenty of time for the Rendell Administration's Medical Board to show
improvement, but there has been none. In fact the current membership makeup of
the Board is essentially the same as under the Ridge/Schweiker administration.
I now believe the problem is, as Public Citizen suggests, the law that requires
that doctors make up the majority membership of the State Medical Board.
Doctors protecting doctors rather than patients. If that is the case, then in
order to protect patients, we must amend those laws to require that majority
membership be made up individuals interested in protecting public safety.
Better yet, membership to the PA State Medical Board should be gained through
the electoral process. In the meantime, due in part to the State Medical Boards
failure to discipline doctors on true public safety charges, doctors, hospital
organizations, and their legislative lobbyists have been quick to attack our
constitutional rights to hold them accountable. My discovery of the conditions
I've described came about as a result of my mother's untimely death, and my
eventual discovery of what appears to be a combination of medical negligence,
incompetence, and alteration of medical records on the part of her physician.
For those of you who are questioning why I didn't take the doctor to court on
malpractice charges, I assure you I tried. At the time I attempted to find an
attorney to take the case, I was as naive as you probably are right now. I
assumed that the merits of the case were all that mattered. That, however, is
not the situation. Past legislative gains by doctors organizations have made it
extremely difficult to hold doctors accountable in court, or even find an
attorney for many victims of medical malpractice/negligence.
The details and support for the statements I
have made thus far are contained within this web site. Please click on the
links to find them. The information is structured vertically in links pretty
much as I created them, beginning with the narrative which follows this
paragraph, followed by the links from the top in chronological order. It's a
diary of sorts of my quest to hold this doctor accountable. If you read it,
unless you are a politician or a malpractice attorney, you will likely be as
surprised as I was about the ineffectiveness of PA State government in
protecting the public from physicians who are public safety threats.
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LINK: Public Citizen: Challenging the Medical malpractice Claims of the Doctors' Lobby |
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DOS: Newsroom Jan 10, 2005 Disciplinary Actions
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I had always assumed my parent’s physician
would do a better job than I could at protecting their medical well being.
Sadly, I was wrong. I believe my mother would be alive today if my parents, on
February 5, 1997, had gone to a hospital emergency room instead of the office
of Lebanon, Pa. area physician Robert Lester Barton. Had they
done so, I'm confident my mother would have been given a cardiology test
commensurate with her risk factors and symptoms.
If a licensed physician cannot be depended
upon to properly synchronize the diagnosis of coronary artery disease with the
available testing procedures to determine its presence, should that physician
have a license to practice medicine? When a licensed physician fails to act
upon a patient's life threatening symptoms and risk factors, despite numerous
opportunities to do so over a long period of time, should the public be warned
of this type of nonperformance? And if that physician retains a medical license
in spite of these lapses, how do we protect the public from the risks
associated with these failures? It is the purpose of this web page to try to
find ways to prevent tragedies like this from happening again. I hope to bring
the information of my mother's case before local and state legislators and
medical officials in the hope of using enforceable regulations as a means of
meeting this goal. I intend to use this web page to report on my progress in
this endeavor.