1-1banner
 
medpundit
 

 
Commentary on medical news by a practicing physician.
 

 
Google
  • Epocrates MedSearch Drug Lookup




  • MASTER BLOGS





    "When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov




    ''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.''
    -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.




    "Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel



    email: medpundit-at-ameritech.net

    or if that doesn't work try:

    medpundit-at-en.com



    Medpundit RSS


    Quirky Museums and Fun Stuff


    Who is medpundit?


    Tech Central Station Columns



    Book Reviews:
    Read the Review

    Read the Review

    Read the Review

    More Reviews

    Second Hand Book Reviews

    Review


    Medical Blogs

    rangelMD

    DB's Medical Rants

    Family Medicine Notes

    Grunt Doc

    richard[WINTERS]

    code:theWebSocket

    Psychscape

    Code Blog: Tales of a Nurse

    Feet First

    Tales of Hoffman

    The Eyes Have It

    medmusings

    SOAP Notes

    Obels

    Cut-to -Cure

    Black Triangle

    CodeBlueBlog

    Medlogs

    Kevin, M.D

    The Lingual Nerve

    Galen's Log

    EchoJournal

    Shrinkette

    Doctor Mental

    Blogborygmi

    JournalClub

    Finestkind Clinic and Fish Market

    The Examining Room of Dr. Charles

    Chronicles of a Medical Mad House

    .PARALLEL UNIVERSES.

    SoundPractice

    Medgadget
    Health Facts and Fears

    Health Policy Blogs

    The Health Care Blog

    HealthLawProf Blog

    Facts & Fears

    Personal Favorites

    The Glittering Eye

    Day by Day

    BioEdge

    The Business Word Inc.

    Point of Law

    In the Pipeline

    Cronaca

    Tim Blair

    Jane Galt

    The Truth Laid Bear

    Jim Miller

    No Watermelons Allowed

    Winds of Change

    Science Blog

    A Chequer-Board of Night and Days

    Arts & Letters Daily

    Tech Central Station

    Blogcritics

    Overlawyered.com

    Quackwatch

    Junkscience

    The Skeptic's Dictionary



    Recommended Reading

    The Doctor Stories by William Carlos Williams


    Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 by Elizabeth Fenn


    Intoxicated by My Illness by Anatole Broyard


    Raising the Dead by Richard Selzer


    Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy


    The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks


    The Sea and Poison by Shusaku Endo


    A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich




    MEDICAL LINKS

    familydoctor.org

    American Academy of Pediatrics

    General Health Info

    Travel Advice from the CDC

    NIH Medical Library Info

     



    button

    Tuesday, May 01, 2007

    Egads: John Tierney interviews the jurors who convicted Dr. Hurwitz of inappropriately prescribing narcotics:

    The evidence in the case – including conversatons during office visits that were furtively recorded by patients cooperating with narcotics agents – showed that Dr. Hurwitz was being conned. On one recording, a patient who'd been selling his OxyContins bragged to his wife (and fellow dealer) that Dr. Hurwitz "trusts the [expletive] out of me."

    "Those patients used the doctor shamelessly," said a juror I'll call Juror 1. (All three jurors, citing the controversy over the case, spoke to me on condition of anonymity, so I'll refer to them by numbers.) This juror added, "They exploited him. I didn't see him getting anything financial out of it. Many of his patients weren't even paying him. He had to believe that he was just treating them for pain."

    The other jurors agreed. "There was no financial benefit to him that was very evident to us," Juror 2 said. "It was a really hard case for all of us. I think that Dr. Hurwitz really did care about his patients."

    So why convict him? "There were just some times he fell down on the job," Juror 2 said. The third juror echoed that argument using the prosecution’s language: "There were red flags he should have seen."

    Plenty of doctors would agree that he should have paid more attention to those warning signs. Plenty would agree that he fell down on the job. Some have already said he should have lost his medical license. But falling down on the job is generally not a criminal offense, especially when there's no criminal intent.
    I asked the three jurors what they made of the distinction made by Dr. Hurwitz's lawyers and by the judge: that this trial was not a malpractice case. In legalese, the jurors were to decide not whether Dr. Hurwitz had provided the proper "standard of care," but whether he had violated the Controlled Substances Act by prescribing drugs "outside the bounds of medical practice." The jurors said they were all aware of the distinction, but none of them claimed to understand it.

    "I don’t know that I know enough to be clear about that gray area between malpractice and out of bounds," Juror 1 said.

    "We just had to go with our gut," Juror 2 said.

    "That was definitely a struggle," Juror 3 said. "That was a gray area."


    Let that be a lesson. Be like House, don't trust the patients.
     

    posted by Sydney on 5/01/2007 08:38:00 AM 2 comments

    2 Comments:

    So what's the difference, Sydney?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2:55 AM  

    Do you mean "What's the difference between malpractice and out of bounds?" You can make a good argument for malpractice - but that's not what he was convicted of. He was convicted of a criminal offense involving trafficking of narcotics.

    We can't measure pain objectively. We have to take a patient's word for it. His crime seems not so much trafficking in narcotics as trusting his patients too much. Should someone really be put in jail for that?

    Society can't have it both ways. You can't whine that doctors undertreat pain then turn around and put a doctor in jail for treating pain.

    By Blogger Sydney, at 6:00 AM  

    Post a Comment

    This page is powered by Blogger, the easy way to update your web site.

    Main Page

    Ads

    Home   |   Archives

    Copyright 2006