In recent years, as concerns over Flin Flon’s health care have reached an apparent crescendo, I have been struck by a peculiar reality: how little leeway doctors have in defending themselves.
Patients have license to say pretty much anything about the care they receive from a physician. And if you’re at all connected to the grapevine (or Facebook), you know that a lot of those comments are critical.
But confidentiality laws bar those same physicians from publicly discussing the particulars of any one patient’s situation.
It has to be this way, of course, but here’s the consequence: any negative story we hear about health care is always going to be one-sided. One hundred per cent of the narrative belongs to the patient.
If there’s one thing you learn in journalism, it’s that the truth is often nuanced. So when someone goes around saying he had a bad experience with his doctor, my first instinct is to wonder what the doctor’s side of the story is, even though I know I’ll never know.
In a fish bowl environment like Flin Flon, a doctor’s inability to effectively defend himself from public critiques is particularly worrisome given that he may have done nothing wrong. Let’s face it, in our community, rumour and innuendo have the muscle to supersede truth.
Of course doctors elsewhere face the same dilemma. Nowhere is that more evident than on RateMDs.com, a website where anyone can anonymously post reviews of any physician, by name and location.
RateMDs.com explicitly tells physicians that they can’t sue the website, no matter how libelous the contents. The site also warns that “it’s illegal” for doctors to pose as patients and post glowing reviews of themselves.
Axe to grind
Incredible. If I have an axe to grind with a particular physician, I can get a group of people together to post make-believe reviews that will impair that doctor’s reputation and livelihood.
But if that physician, rightly fearing for his reputation and livelihood, tries to even the score by posting make-believe reviews that sing his praises, then he is breaking the law.
I don’t know how common it is for people in Flin Flon to exaggerate claims about how bad their health care is. Nor do I know how frequently people take to RateMDs.com to denigrate a physician for no reason.
Maybe this never happens. Maybe it happens all the time. The point is, we don’t know, so to blindly accept as fact every grapevine horror story about health care makes little sense.
It should also be noted that health care horror stories can arise as honest byproducts of the imperfect discipline that is modern medicine.
One story that made the rounds had to do with a patient undergoing surgery in Flin Flon only to be told by a hospital in a larger centre that the surgery was avoidable.
In such cases, it’s not a given that the Flin Flon hospital was wrong and the larger hospital was right, because health care professionals are often at odds on what’s medically necessary.
As one example, Alan Cassels, author of the book Seeking Sickness, refers to a study showing that radiologists disagree 37 per cent of the time when interpreting the same CT body scan.
Far be it from me to say there are no valid concerns with Flin Flon health care; external reviews of the system have identified a number of them.
I just think that in an environment where one side (complainants) can say anything while the other side (doctors and support staff) is legally compelled into silence, we may not have a complete a picture of the system.
Local Angle runs Fridays.
