The Medical Board of California broke its own rules and appointed a doctor who had been disciplined by the board to oversee the practice of an obstetrician now accused of negligence in a patient death.
Antidote reviewed records from both the medical board investigation and the criminal investigation into the care that Dr. Andrew Rutland gave a Chinese immigrant who died in his office in October 2009. The records underscore lapses in physician discipline that persisted years after scores of government and media investigations.
In the first of my “Making Hepatitis History” series of posts, I wrote about the Southern Nevada Health District’s Public Health Investigation Report about the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada, the epicenter of the worst hepatitis C outbreak ever to hit the US.
You might be alarmed at what you find in the bankruptcy records for a medical company or a physician. Here are a few things that have alarmed me.
- Patient records, with birth dates and social security numbers.
- Charts showing detailed histories of visits, procedures and lab workups over decades.
- Pathology lab reports.
Why would you find all these things mixed in with more mundane financial records showing the sums various people are owed?
I started listing my favorite stories of the past year, in no particular order, on Dec. 21. Here is the rest of the list.
“At VA Hospital, A Rogue Cancer Unit,” Walt Bogdanich, The New York Times
Last week, Antidote spoke with Dr. Doris K. Cope, a seasoned anesthesiologist and pain medicine specialist from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who is one of the voices behind the new Life Line to Modern Medicine campaign from the American Society of Anesthesiologists.
It sometimes seems like it takes a high-profile case like Terri Schiavo to get people to think about end-of-life issues – or editors to agree to stories on the topic.
For Mark Campano’s entire career as an anesthesiologist, other doctors worried that he was a bomb waiting to go off. They saw him showing up for work drowsy and agitated from weeks of caffeinated days and alcohol-soaked nights. They counseled him about his drug abuse and urged him to stop.
