Anyway, get ready for rationing, it’s coming fast fast fast.

Doctors should do what they do and leave the rest of this crap alone.

Thanks for your comments, and your years of study and service. You provide much food for thought.

Only in one area do I question your judgment: you seem far too forgiving of the contribution of litigation attorneys to the current mess.

Ah, well, now I come to think of it, the problem can properly be laid at the feet of a two generations of judges and juries who have been raised with several corrosive ideas:

1) If anything bad happens, it has to be someone’s fault.

2) There’s pots of money in the hands of manufacturers, doctors, hospitals, and it’s there only because they swindled it from poor deserving victims, so we need to balance the scales and re-distribute the wealth by awarding damages to people who have suffered, even if their suffering wasn’t precisely caused by the people we’re taking the money from.

My highly attentive brother notes that within the last couple of decades the U.S. courts made a significant change in the area of expert scientific evidence, giving the presiding judge control over what evidence would be allowed to support claims.

Anyone have some special knowledge of that?

Thanks to all for a fascinatin’ discussion.

Why? Why on Earth should a licensed MD “review results” of something he has no training for or knowledge about? So there’s somebody to sue?

What it does is that it scans the body with radio waves to identify disease, bacteria, level of hormones, bodily fluids. Every living organism and element has a radio wave signature so this computer/machine has been programed with over 16,000 disease signatures to be able to identify every known disease, bacteria, virus etc, and the level of infections. It has been approved by the FDA for diagnostic purposes. It is better than other tests for viral diseases which cannot tbe identified with a drug test. St. Johns hospital in Santa Monica has several. They are not that expensive.

Where the FDA and the Drug companies have heartburn, is that it not only can diagnose, it can treat. The scanning process can be reversed; where a disease has been identified by its radio wave signature, the SCIO machine is designed to focus small amounts of radio waves at the appropriate signature to attack the disease. These treatments are not overwhelming; the dosages are small. Raging diseases are not knocked out in one treatment. But this machine is particularly effective against those diseases than cannot be treated by traditional medicine, particularly those of the auto-immune kind.

Now the point of this post, to affirm the track of recent comments, is that this machine does not need a doctor to operate it, although a supervising MD would/ should review results and treatments. It could easily by operated by a nurse. People not licensed as an MD in the alternative medicine underground are using it now.

If used properly medical advances like this machine should be able to cut medical costs.

There are lots of good arguments for, and lots of excellent imaginary redesigns, involving other-than-physician providers. The problem is liability – and it’s not principally a lawyer problem, although they help make it worse.

People expect the best from their doctor, and they are angry when they don’t get it. The imaginary “standard of care” involves the “average” physician, not the best – but half of the physicians are below average (by definition). Take an informal poll of most of your non-plaintiff friends and neighbors (potential future jury members) and ask them what should happen to a doctor who makes a mistake that leads to a death. Their responses will reveal a belief to you that a) Doctors should be inerrant, b) medical errors are fully equivalent to crimes, and c) such “criminals” should not work, ever again.

Now, a moment of reflection will reveal that this creates an impossible situation. Everyone makes mistakes. In thirty-forty years, over tens of thousands of patients, this will actually be rather common. Most are trivial, some are not. Most really serious nonculpable errors involve misdiagnosis. Diagnosis is a subtle and complex skill which is not appreciated by most students nor by most of their teachers. It grows and grows throughout a career, and is almost impossible to objectively test for or measure.

Right now, physicians supervise mid-levels and are completely accountable for their work. Flooding the zone with midlevels is possible, but with no supervision their lack of training and especially their lack of experience with diagnosis will become a problem. Now, this is a problem we could easily afford, were it not for the view of your friends and neighbors that the process should guarantee inerrancy.

The lawyers don’t generate this demand. They just service the market. Until that changes, the supply problem cannot be fixed.

Comments from Gokart-Mozart and others with specialized knowledge would be much appreciated.

It would require a TON of changes in our system. The present EMS system (“Emergency Medical Services”) is contingent on a well-established and functioning hospital network with designated specialized trauma facilities and teams. The basis of the EMS system is that it’s meant to provide basic life support and transport to a state-of-the-art hospital trauma facility.

Maybe what we need is a low-tech primary-care system that can provide treatment for injuries that are not life-threatening, dispense or prescribe specified medications, and do “triage” to identify patients that might need more advanced diagnostic or therapeutic services. I know that’s easy to say, but right now hospitals are swamped by patients with hang-nails, headaches, and hematomas.

“Neighborhood clinics?”

On submarines and destroyers in World War II, corpsmen performed a lot of life-saving medical procedures “above their pay grade” – or so a lot of sailors will testify.

The lawsuit-obsessed culture that has festered into being in this country has made a shambles of “good samaritan” inclinations. If there’s a horrific vehicle crash – multiple casualties, bodies lying about obviously injured – laws in some regions require EMTs to stop and render aid even if they are NOT on duty, but do not protect them from lawsuits from the people they are assisting. In Virginia Beach, VA, a drunk driver in a Mercedes smashed into a VOLUNTEER RESCUE SQUAD AMBULANCE with its lights and siren going. Because the ambulance had just started moving through an intersection against the traffic light, the AMBULANCE DRIVER was arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison, despite the high blood alcohol level of the other driver.

It’s an incredibly complex situation all around – medicine and all the “healing arts” can take decades of study, and there are some people who simply should never be allowed to touch a patient or make medical decisions for another living creature.

But I ‘spect circumstances are steering us inevitably toward having to provide stopgap informal medical care, whether it’s by boy scouts with special merit badges, former ranger/seal medics, nurse/practitioners, or shamans waving smoking leaves.